Corpus of meteo-metaphors and sports journalism in the age of COVID-19 from the “Avalanche of Injuries” to “Everything Sails into the Wind”

Abstract

This study addresses the analysis of the main lexical patterns, mostly in the form of adverbial locutions and idioms, which could be classified as meteorological metaphors (or meteo-metaphors) used in the Spanish digital sports press and tries to find out if there is a specific sport in which metaphors that use weather phenomena to describe or characterize aspects of sports stand out. From a quasi-experimental approach, a method of content analysis is used on a generated corpus based on the 20 most common meteorological phenomena reported by the Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET) and the Sistema de Notificación de Observaciones Atmosféricas Singulares (SINOBAS) (System of Notification of Singular Atmospheric Observations); as corpus we analyze the sports section of the digital edition of the Spanish free newspaper 20minutos, the most read newspaper in Spain, in April 2022, according to GfK DAM (the official measure of digital media consumption in Spain). The study is limited in time to one year, between March 14, 2020 (the date of the beginning of the state of alarm for COVID-19 in Spain) and June 21, 2021. After studying the frequency and context of these samples, the data indicate that the four meteorological phenomena that generate the most metaphors are those related to “ola” [wave], huracán [hurricane], calor [heat] and “sequía” [drought]. Moreover, there are no surprises with respect to the sport where such metaphors are used to the greatest extent: soccer. Nevertheless, it will be sociolinguistically justified that other sports connected to those metaphors stand out: “wave” / Tokyo Olympics Games, “hurricane” / F1, “heat” / NFL, and “drought” / tennis. The complete corpus of 273 meteorological metaphors has been publicly hosted at https://t.ly/XPT0V.