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

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