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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1138

Part of Session 135: The sociolinguistics of football (Other abstracts in this session)

The Football World Cup as a linguistic event: an analysis of register features in British media coverage

Authors: Fest, Jennifer
Submitted by: Fest, Jennifer (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)

Football has, since its development in the 19th century, become the most popular sport in Europe and has gained economic and even political importance that reaches far beyond the events on the pitch itself. Especially during big events such as European or World Cups, everything else seems to come second to the matches of the national teams, and the facts that players are treated like rock stars and politicians make huge spectacles of visiting stadiums and teams show the impact on society and make the world of football an interesting field to study. Within this framework, the media coverage plays a very particular part (cf. Beard 1998) and especially newspaper journalists find themselves in the difficult situation of dealing with a target group who assumedly has watched the matches – entirely or partially – live on TV and accordingly has already formed an opinion about the events before reading an article about them. Furthermore, this opinion will most likely be shared by most people throughout a country when it comes to the success or failure of the own national team. Journalists covering a World Cup can thus safely afford a certain degree of subjectivity themselves – it might even be expected from them – and can thus build up a very different relationship to their readers than journalists in many other branches.
On the basis of these assumptions, this study takes a closer look at the newspaper coverage of the World Cup 2010 in British tabloids by analysing a corpus comprised of 352 articles. The data was part-of-speech tagged for this purpose and, on a theoretical foundation of approaches to media impact theory (Schenk 2007; Bonfadelli 1999), was examined mainly along the lines of register features as described by Halliday (e.g. 1989, also Halliday & Hasan 1989), namely the factors of field, mode and tenor of discourse.  Of these, as expected, the aspect of mode, dealing with the relationship between the discourse participants and its reflection in the language usage, proved especially interesting as the distance between the journalist and the intended readers on the one and the journalist and the team on the other hand were found to be closely related, though varying constantly depending on the national team’s performances. The important role of the author as a pivotal point in this constellation is thus reflected in the way the assumed opinion of the target group is taken up and processed in the articles with relation to the developments of the tournament.

References:

Beard, Adrian. 1998. The language of sport. London: Routledge.

Bonfadelli, Heinz. 1999. Medienwirkungsforschung: Grundlagen und theoretische Perspektiven. 2nd ed. Konstanz: UVK Medien Verlagsgesellschaft.

Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood, and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1989. Language, context, and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 1989. Spoken and written language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schenk, Michael. 2007. Medienwirkungsforschung. 3rd ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.