Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 576

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

“I will not step into the ground until he’s gone.”: An analysis of discursive fan identity construction in an unofficial online forum.

Authors: Heaney, Dermot Brendan
Submitted by: Heaney, Dermot Brendan (Università degli studi di Roma 'Tor Vergata', Italy)

The football manager has emerged as an undisputed protagonist in contemporary football, especially in the English Premier League. This fact is recognized by recent and current series on this figure in the major media in Britain (Ronay, Brackley, Peston).

In June 2011, it was rumoured that Birmingham City FC manager Alex McLeish was about to move across the city to manage local rivals Aston Villa. The media rumour brought a storm of protest from Aston Villa Fans, a number of whom demonstrated outside Villa Park, while others expressed their views on the of the major unofficial online fan forum Vitalastonvilla.

This response indicates just how much attention managers can now attract from the fan base, and how much controversy the appointment of an unpopular manager can generate. Even before the appointment, the club’s CE posted a preemptive reply to assuage the malcontents, stirring up a hornets’ nest of claims as to who represents the club - the fans or its American owner and CE - introducing further national and corporate complications into the issue of fan and club identity.

The focus of this paper is football fan discourse in response to the appointment of unpopular manager, and in particular on aspects of discursive fan identity construction and self-image construction (Luhrs), in contributions to a club’s main unofficial online fan forum in response to a posting by Aston Villa CE General Kulak. The analysis will focus on various forms of identity work, particularly spatial identity work (Billig, Benwell/Stokoe, Gunn) and in-group and out-group identity work, and their related discursive strategies, particularly the deployment of place and person deixis, linguistic impoliteness, derogation, denial (Wodak), and demotic language use. This analysis will be used to correlate discursive identity realizations across a spectrum of fan positions with key discursive identity construction strategies, and to explore how these interact in an ongoing (re)negotiation of fan and club identity in the face of corporate strategies and appointments that are perceived to threaten or betray them.

References:

Billig, (1995) M. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

Benwell B., Stokoe, E. (2006), Discourse and Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Gunn, S. (2001) The spatial turn: Changin histories of space and place. In S. Gunn and R. J. Morris (Eds.) Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850. Aldershot: Aldgate.

Luhrs, J. (2008) Football Chants and ‘Blaison Populaire’: The construction of local and regional stereotypes. In E. Lavric, G. Pisek, A. Skinner, W. Stadler (eds.) The Linguistics of Football. Tubingen: Narr Franke Attempto Verlag Gmbh a co. Kg. pp. 233-244.

Wodak, R., de Cilla, R., Reisigl, M., Liebhart, K. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Peston R. (2012). Among the Managers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b018xt53/Among_the_Managers_Episode_1/

Media references:

Ronay, B. (2009) The Manager. ttp://www.guardian.co.uk/football/video/2009/aug/12/the-manager-barney-ronay

Brackley, I. (2011) Football’s Greatest Managers. Sky Sports.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

“I will not step into the ground until he’s gone.”: An analysis of discursive fan identity construction in an unofficial online forum.