| Sažetak | The aim of this paper is to examine to what extent speakers’ cultural knowledge can contribute to understanding sports-related idiomatic expressions in business context. The paper first seeks to identify the notion of idiom and idiomatic expressions in a broader view, approaching the identification of idioms from the traditional and cognitivist standpoints. It then explores the influence of culture on idiomatic language in a speech community and the notion of context from sociocognitive perspective. As the underlying assumption in this paper is that sport and business share a lot of concepts together, some of them were examined regarding their roles in both domains. The corpus contains 67 idiomatic expressions, which are derived from seven American and British sports and the additional category of Any Sport. They are exemplified in the business context from different genres, provided by COCA and the BNC. The results of the analysis of the distribution and frequency of the sports- related idiomatic expressions in business English, regarding a single sport they come from, the team sports vs. individual sports division and the kind of genres they are found in. The findings show that the largest figures of such expressions in business context do not correspond to the degree or the popularity of the analyzed American or British sports. Rather, they mostly belong to the sports with long traditions, such as boxing, horse racing and track and field. Also, the higher frequency of these expressions in business English is related to individual sports. Finally, the most frequent genre that provides business contents with sporting idiomatic expressions is the blog. It has proved to offer more specific business topics, compared to the newspaper, the spoken genre and the TV. Yet, they are dealt with in a less formal register, close to idiomatic language, than demonstrated on the web, in the magazine and in the most formal academic genre. The research shows that the source domain of sports corresponds to the target domain of business in many ways. However, due to the specific nature of the business English discourse, the occurrence of sports-related idiomatic expressions in it is not as large as expected. |
