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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1322

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

Ritual and discourse in football post-match press conference across languages and cultures

Authors: Androulakis, George
Submitted by: Androulakis, George (University of Thessaly, Greece)

This paper focuses on the press conference which takes place after a football match with the participation of the two teams’ managers and, in some cases, of selected players. The approach adopted by the paper is sociolinguistic and pragmatic, as the treatment of the press conference is made in terms of the setting, the rules, the context, the conditions, but also of the content and the discourse patterns reproduced in it. Examples for the analysis are taken from football leagues in five European countries and cultures: England (the Premiership), France (Ligue 1), Spain (La Primera), Italy (Serie A) and Greece (Superleague).

Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural remarks are made on the practices, the ground rules and the interaction patterns of the press conference in the European leagues mentioned above. In general, this is a largely interactive communicative event (van Dijk, 1988, 8). The setting and organisation of the event, the stages and turn-taking are generally culture-specific; for instance, the importance of the secondary audience (fans watching on television) determines the staging of the press conference in many ways. The balance between monologue and the question-answer model (Ghadessy, 1988) seems to be context-specific, too. Thus, one-to-one communication (an interviewer posing questions to the interviewee) is more common in Italy, Spain or Greece, while the one-to-many model (an interviewer posing questions on behalf of all the journalists accredited to the football event), is frequent in England and France. Moreover, humour and irony are more tolerated and expected in England and Italy than in Spain and Greece. Links to local (Marr, Davis & Randall, 1999) and genre identities are also obvious in many sequences across the cultures studied.

On the other hand, the techniques of neutrality or partiality in the journalists’ questions or the managers’ strategies of answers and evasions tend to be more universal, whereas the opposition between winning and losing managers turns out to be relevant from a discourse point of view. Some aspects of the content are particularly sport-specific and explain marked differences with the news interviews (Clayman & Heritage, 2002), but others seem more global, like (rare) references to non-football matters. In fact, the links between football and other social phenomena look weak in our data from press conferences across Europe. Finally, a last issue of interest concerns the interpretation of discourse produced (necessary when an interviewee does not speak the local language of the audience), its patterns, constraints and biases.

References

Clayman, Steven & John Heritage (2002). The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: CUP.

Ghadessy, Mohsen (1998). “The Language of Written Sports Commentary: Soccer - a  Description”. In Ghadessy, Mohsen (ed.), Registers of Written English. Situational Factors and Linguistic Features. London: Pinter.

Marr, Liz, Dave Francis & Dave Randall (1999). “ ‘The Soccer Game’ as Journalistic Work: Managing the Production of Stories about a Football Club”. In Jalbert, Paul L. (ed.) Media Studies: Ethnomethodological Approaches. Lanham: University Press of America.

van Dijk, Teun A. (1988). News Analysis. Case Studies of International and National News in the Press. Hilsdale, NJ, Hove & London: Lawrence Erlbaum.