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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 494

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

Styling through grammar in football broadcasting

Authors: Aijón Oliva, Miguel Angel
Submitted by: Aijón Oliva, Miguel Angel (Universidad de Salamanca, Spain)

Current advances in the analysis of syntactic variation show that the symbolic view of grammar promoted by cognitivism and related approaches (e.g. Goldberg 2003, Langacker 2009) can prove very fruitful for the study of speech as a tool for the development of situated identities and interpersonal relationships, that is, as an element of style (Eckert 2000, Coupland 2007, etc.). This is due to the inherently meaningful nature of linguistic choices, which makes it possible for them to generate meanings at any possible semiotic level. The internal, cognitive foundations of grammatical constructions are not unrelated to its discursive, pragmatic and social effects (cf. Serrano & Aijón Oliva 2011). Variation thus entails the possibility to choose whatever can be communicated within some context.

Following this line, a case study will be presented of the narrative of a Spanish League football match between two second-division teams, as broadcasted by a radio station from the holding town. The analysis will focus on several interrelated Spanish grammatical phenomena, namely variable subject expression and placement, as well as variable object position and object-verb agreement through clitic affixes. These formal facts and their contextual effects seem to be explainable by considering the relative degrees of cognitive salience achieved by subject vs. object referents (e.g. Aijón Oliva 2006).

All three broadcasters taking part in the narrative show some preference for the variants enhancing referent salience when talking about players in the local team, while the opposite obtains when they refer to the visitors. The most significant examples are found when some player attacks or even harms a rival, these being kinds of events coming close to Langacker’s canonical event model – the way such physical clashes are syntactically described can reveal a particular, subjective perception of the extralinguistic event. Interestingly, through such choices the broadcasters not only project a certain view of the players and of their actions, but at the same time are shaping their own images as speakers. The subtle suggestion of bias towards the local team will foster identification with the audience and thus be positively evaluated in the context of football broadcasting.

Finally, the analysis will show that, even if individual morphosyntactic choices may not be salient enough to be perceived as stylistically motivated, the patterned conjunction of a number of them can embody a particular socio-communicative style, aimed to configure some image of the self and others. This stresses the need to improve quantitative sociolinguistic analysis through the systematic incorporation of the qualitative, interactional facets of variation.

References

Aijón Oliva, M.A. 2006. Variación morfosintáctica e interacción social. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.

Coupland, N. 2007. Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eckert, P. 2000. Linguistic variation as social practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

Goldberg, A.E. 2003. Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 219-224.

Langacker. R.W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Serrano, M.J. & M.A. Aijón Oliva. 2011. Syntactic variation and communicative style. Language Sciences 33: 138-153.