The game of cricket as a source of metaphors

• Authors: Izabela Dixon
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Once a part of the social experience of a relatively small minority, eventually cricket, with its rich terminology, became a fixed concept for a large part of the English nation. With the passage of time, cricket started to lend vocabulary and phrases to areas of experience outside the sport and its literal domains. However, it is not the origin of a phrase that is responsible for its comprehension, nor is it its literal meaning; it is the fact that the phrase has become an established part of a conceptual system of the nation. The literal meaning of an idiomatic expression or the meaning of its individual components will generally be of little help in its interpretation. Frequently there does not seem to be a direct correlation between them and if a connection exists, it is often arbitrary. The main purpose of the article is to present a selection of nine idioms/metaphors the source domain of which is the English sport of cricket. An attempt is also made to show the possible degrees of correlation between the literal and non-literal meanings of the examples considered. For the analysis of the metaphors the conceptual metaphor theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) has been applied.

Keywords

EN

cricket; idioms; metaphors; conceptual system; socio-cultural identity

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Gdański
• Journal: Beyond Philology: An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching
• Year: 2012
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 7-23

Contributors

author

Izabela Dixon

• Filologiczne Studia Doktoranckie, Uniwersytet Gdański
• Instytut Neofilologii i Komunikacji Społecznej, Politechnika Koszalińska

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Identifiers

ISSN

1732-1220