A Schematic Discoursal Study of Chinese Football Players’ Commercial Transfer News

Abstract

This cognitive discoursal study explores human cognitive mechanisms by analyzing Football Players’ Commercial Transfer News (FPCTN) through adopting Gibbs’ (2010) embodied view of image schemas in language use and their interpretations in Chinese sports contexts, based on the database of 36 pieces of news reports collected from authoritative sports websites. The results demonstrate that FPCTN writers actively construct their meanings and perspectives by applying various metaphysical and metaphysicalized forms of image schemas, which are grounded on our knowledge and daily bodily experience. Discourse consumers, on the other hand, unconsciously engage themselves in imaginative simulation processes, which are fundamentally embodied in their past and present bodily experiences, to facilitate their understanding of linguistic information and writers’ intentions, which predicates the process of public general cognition construction and frame, meanwhile, constituting the mechanism of a news reader’s passionate identification with and attachment to a potential commodity in his/her social and entertainment life.