caa a22 4500 386349266 CHVBK 20180307111823.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198903 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0047404500013269 doi S0047404500013269 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0047404500013269 The semantics of winning and losing [Elektronische Daten] Headlines reporting the outcomes of professional and college football games for an entire football season from two major newspapers were analyzed in an attempt to answer three questions: (1) What kind(s) of language do sportswriters use in attempting to be playful or humorous? (2) Is there a pattern to the number of ways winning and losing can be described? (3) What effects might creative use of language in such headlines have on the English language in general? Of the 930 headlines collected, there were 222 different transitive verbs (e.g., ambush, batter, burn, flog, maul, smash) and 81 intransitive verbs (e.g., breeze, cruise, lose, rally, win). On a descriptive linguistic level, most headlines (a) were in the form of subject-verb-object; (b) used alliteration and punning (Rice Burns Baylor); and (c) used almost any action verb to denote winning. On a psycholinguistic level, an argument is presented for semantic generativity, the ability of the context and the metaphorical possibilities of words to have almost any verb make sense in a headline. Finally, on a historical linguistic level, it is suggested that continued use of a verb for winning and losing (such as maul and pulverize) may lead to a change in their meaning. (Semantics, language change, language of sports) Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Smith Michael K. Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Montgomery Michael B. Department of English, University of South Carolina Language in Society Cambridge University Press 18/1(1989-03), 31-57 0047-4045 18:1<31 1989 18 LSY https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500013269 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500013269 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Smith Michael K. Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Montgomery Michael B. Department of English, University of South Carolina NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Language in Society Cambridge University Press 18/1(1989-03), 31-57 0047-4045 18:1<31 1989 18 LSY CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge