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Metaphors in the flesh: Metaphorical pantomimes in sports celebrations

  • Raymond W. Gibbs EMAIL logo
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

When athletes make significant plays in sporting competitions, such as scoring a goal in soccer, a touchdown in American football, they often immediately express their joy by performing some bodily action for others to see and understand. Many sports celebrations are staged pantomimes that express metaphorical meanings as a part of athletes’ pretending to perform certain source-path-goal sequences of action from other competitive events.

This article examines the possible metaphoricity in different sports celebrations and whether casual observers may understand these actions as conveying metaphorical messages. Studies 1 and 3 present analyses of some of the important, possibly metaphorical, characteristics of a corpus of sports celebrations, both those that are performed by individual athletes (Study 1) and those where several athletes jointly enact some celebratory action (Study 3). Studies 2 (individual athletes) and 4 (group performances) investigated whether casual spectators interpret some celebrations as conveying metaphorical messages beyond simply expressing an athlete’s positive emotions. These studies demonstrate that many sports celebrations express metaphorical meanings where athletes provide bodily commentary on the significance of what they have just accomplished.


Corresponding author: Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Soquel, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors and reviewers of this article for their diverse, helpful comments on this work. Receiving reviews of one’s submissions is always challenging. The efforts different scholars put into offering me feedback is much appreciated. These comments made my brain bleed, made me happy, frustrated, lose sleep, but also very grateful. Thanks to this journal for helping me be a better scholar.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2019-0115).


Received: 2019-11-09
Accepted: 2020-11-14
Published Online: 2020-12-10
Published in Print: 2021-02-23

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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