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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 367

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

Football „onlive“ – aspects of multimodal narrativity in webbased live text commentaries

Authors: Hauser, Stefan
Submitted by: Hauser, Stefan (University of Zurich, Switzerland)

It is a relatively recent phenomenon of media history that live sports can be followed in written form on a computer screen and not only on the radio or on television. The so called “live-ticker” (also „event-tracker“ or „matchcast“) is a webbased genre that enables the users to follow a football game as a hypertextual and multimodal narrative. On the one hand the ongoing events are described almost simultaneously in short intervals and are presented in inverted chronological order. On the other hand the written presentation of the match is accompanied by rich event-related information in various semiotic forms and structures (statistics, pictures of players, different kinds of live-graphics etc.). So, one major point the contribution wants to shed light on  the various forms of multimodal narrativity that are observable in live-tickers.

What makes the live-ticker a fundamentally new form of live-broadcasting is the fact that the modularity and hypertextuality of the presentation offers numerous individual ways of following the events. The recipients have the option between different semiotic ressources that are organized in different modules. By individually selecting and activating different informational units the users are not only involved in the composition of the information but also in the narrative representation of the events that are simultaneously reported. There are different kinds as well as different degrees of interactivity which contribute to a new type of multimodal and simultaneous narrative. Furthermore the users can comment on either the events that are reported or on comments that are posted by other users. Thus, a second major interest of this paper is how interactivity is involved in the production and the perception of the events.

There is another important aspect that is crucial for a sociolinguistic perspective on the live-ticker as a new means of sports coverage. It is the combination of linguistic elements taken from written reports with elements of oral live-broadcasting known from radio and tv. The convergence of oral and written style elements has specific reasons in live text commentaries. What forms of written orality occur in the live-ticker and what role they play is the third and last question of this presentation.

Literature:

Bieber, Christoph/Hebecker, Eike (2002): You’ll never surf alone. Online-Inszenierungen des Sports. In Schwier, Jürgen (Hrsg.): Mediensport. Ein einführendes Handbuch. Hohengehren: Schneider: 211-232.

Chovanec, Jan (2008): Enacting an imaginary community. Infotainment in on-line minute-by-minute sports commentaries. In: Lavric, Eva; Gerhard Pisek; Andrew Skinner; and Wolfgang Stadler (eds.). 2008. The linguistics of football. Tuebingen: Narr: 255-268.

Hauser, Stefan (2010): Der Live-Ticker in der Online-Berichterstattung: zur Entstehung einer neuen Mediengattung. In: Bucher, Hans-Jürgen / Gloning, Thomas / Lehnen, Katrin (Hrsg.): Neue Medien - neue Formate. Ausdifferenzierung und Konvergenz in der Medienkommunikation. Frankfurt, New York: Campus: 207-225.

Jucker, Andreas H. (2010) “Audacious, brilliant!! What a strike!”: Live text commentaries on the Internet as real-time narratives. In: Christian R. Hoffmann (ed.). Narrative Revisited. Telling a Story in the Age of New Media. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 57-77.