Conceptual Metaphor Analysis of Football Lingo on Cameroon National Media

This research paper investigates the use of metaphors in post-match reports of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar on CRTV-radio and, on the whole, brings out the ideologies that permeate the metaphors in these reports. The data for this study was collected with recourse to archive method and online downloading. The data constituted four (04) texts (post-match reports of Qatar 2022) which were used to build the corpus. The quantitative and qualitative (descriptive) methods were used to analyse the data. The trend of analysis started with the identification of a trope, its source domain (semantic origin), target domain and progressed to uncovering the ideology (concept) packed in each trope. This source-to-target analysis of metaphors is, thus, conducted in tandem with the workings of Charteris-Black’s (2004) Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), the theoretical framework adopted in this research. To continue, the result proved that CRTV-radio football reporters constructed a plethora of meanings of Qatar 2022 by employing metaphors (registers) from diverse semantic source or domains. Presented in tables and charts, the findings reveal that war metaphors were more pervasive, followed by building metaphors and, finally, by journey metaphors. In essence, the plenitude of war metaphors affirms reporters’ construct of football as war, which underpins the conceptual metaphor “football is war”. The preponderance of war metaphors is a mark of discursive expression, prescription and expectation of bravery, encapsulated in the ‘lion’s spirit’ creed of the Cameroonian president.