The world as a competition arena: functions of sports metaphors in modern electronic media.

The study is devoted to the analysis of the functioning of sports conceptual metaphors in modern media texts. The objectives of the study were to analyze the texts of modern central electronic publications (based on newspaper texts of the National Corpus of the Russian Language), identify the main functions of sports metaphors in the media and determine the reasons for the frequent use of sports metaphors by modern journalists. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the appeal to the functional side of sports metaphors, in a broad approach to their main functions, as well as in an attempt to involve elements of psycholinguistic reasoning in determining the reasons that prompt journalists to turn to sports conceptualization. It has been revealed that most often sports metaphors are used in modern electronic media in nominative, figurative, explanatory, expressive, evaluative, aesthetic, pragmatic functions, as well as in the functions of concretization, categorization, and in most cases several functions are combined. It is noted that journalists are attracted by the dynamism and accuracy of sports metaphors, the ability to convey confidence with their help and make information convincing, the ability to depict serious phenomena as a game, people’s behavior as courageous, and themselves as reliable and strong. With the help of sports metaphors, journalists have the opportunity to describe a phenomenon, object, action more economically, briefly, clearly, understandably, optimistically, effectively, solidly, intensely; depict them more definite, convey a sense of the correctness of what is happening, its compliance or non-compliance with the norm. Conclusions are drawn about the strong position of sports metaphors in the collective linguistic consciousness and about their high significance for the world modeling of a modern man.