It’s Time for a New Chapter. A Discourse-Analytical Analysis of News Articles on the Retirement of Professional Athletes


Abstract


For professional athletes, their retirement constitutes a life-changing event. It marks the ending of a chapter in their lives during which sports-related activities were omnipresent and dominant. Research on the retirement decision and its consequences is mainly conducted in the domain of (sports) psychology. Newspapers and news sites dedicate articles to the retirement of famous athletes: they describe their careers, their honours list, and their reasons for retiring. In this paper, we compare 50 articles from Belgian news media on athletes’ retirements with obituaries, texts that are published when the ultimate life-changing event in a person’s life occurs, with the aim of determining similarities and differences between both text types. To achieve that goal, we collected 50 retirement articles from Flemish media. We carried out a primarily qualitative analysis of their content and analysed the relevant language choices made by the authors. Both text types address the same topics and refrain from including negative aspects. In obituaries, metaphors are mostly introduced to circumvent sensitive topics. In retirement articles, they embellish the discourse. Both text types illustrate the happiness-sadness paradox.

DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v52p165

Keywords: retirement, professional athletes, death discourse, metaphors, discourse analysis

References


Alfermann D., Stambulova N. and Zemaityte A. 2004, Reactions to sport career termination: a cross-national comparison of German, Lithuanian, and Russian athletes, in “Psychology of Sport and Exercise” 5 [1], pp. 61-75.

Cecić Erpič S., Wylleman P. and Zupančič M. 2004, The effect of athletic and non-athletic factors on the sports career termination process, in “Psychology of Sport and Exercise” 5 [1], pp. 45-59.

Cheung, W.-C. and Ho, S.H.Y. 2004, The use of death metaphors to understand personal meaning of death among Hong Kong Chinese undergraduates, in “Death Studies” 28, pp. 47-62.

Cosh S., Crabb S. and LeCouteur A. 2013, Elite athletes and retirement: Identity, choice, and agency, in “Australian Journal of Psychology” 65 [2], pp. 89-97.

Crespo Fernández E. 2006, The language of death: euphemisms and conceptual metaphorization in Victorian obituaries, in “SKY Journal of Linguistics” 19, pp. 101-130.

Crespo Fernández E. 2011, Euphemistic conceptual metaphors in epitaphs from Highgate Cemetery, in “Review of Cognitive Linguistics” 9 [1], pp. 198-225.

Fernandez A., Stephan Y. and Fouquereau E. 2006, Assessing reasons for sports career termination: Development of the Athletes’ Retirement Decision Inventory (ARDI), in “Psychology of Sport and Exercise” 7 [4], pp. 407-421.

Galal M.M. 2014, Death euphemism in English and Arabic. A conceptual metaphorization approach, in “International Journal of Linguistics” 6 [1], pp. 153-170.

Hatamleh M.R. 2013, The life transitions of high performance athletes retirement from sports, in “European Scientific Journal” 9 [11], pp. 336-353.

Heynderickx P. and Dieltjens S. 2016. An analysis of obituaries in staff magazines, in “Death Studies” 40/1, pp. 11-21.

Heynderickx P., Dieltjens S. and Oosterhof A. 2017. The final fight. An analysis of metaphors in online obituaries of professional athletes. In “Omega, Journal of Death and Dying” 79 [4].

Heynderickx P. and Dieltjens S. 2021. Politics beyond death? An analysis of the obituaries of Belgian politicians. In E. Crespo-Fernández (Ed.). Discourse Studies in Public Communication (pp. 129-148). London: John Benjamins.

Moses R.A. and Marelli G.D. 2004, Obituaries and the discursive construction of dying and living, in “Texas Linguistic Forum” 47, pp. 263-279.

Park S., Lavallee D. and Tod D. 2012, Athletes’ career transition out of sport, in “International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology” 6 [1], pp. 22-53.

Pragglejaz Group 2007, MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse, in “Metaphor and Symbol” 22 [1], pp. 1-39.

Sexton J. 1997, The semantics of death and dying: metaphor and mortality, in “A Review of General Semantics” 54 [3], pp. 333-345.

Tay D. 2019, Death in a multicultural society. Metaphor, language and religion in Singapore obituaries, in “Cognitive Linguistic Studies” 6 [1], pp. 84-102.

Wylleman P., Alfermann D. and Lavallee D. 2004, Career transitions in sport: European perspectives, in “Psychology of Sport and Exercise” 5 [1], pp. 7-20.


Full Text: PDF

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.