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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 712

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

A common experience: Interviews with footballers as a reconstructive genre

Authors: Wilton, Antje
Submitted by: Wilton, Antje (University of Siegen, Germany)

Around the world, a professional football match may be a significant event which through its presentation and staging in public media enables millions of people to share it. To satisfy the audience's need for entertainment and information, mass media provide different forms of football commentary, including live commentary, interviews with players, coaches and other experts, reports and live tickers. Not infrequently, though, complaints are voiced about the quality of interviews conducted with football players right after a match. Well-known criticisms target the use of empty formulaics, vague language, avoidance of straight answers by the players, but also inadequate and misleading questioning by reporters. In line with that criticism, footballer interviews seem to be a rich source for linguistic material that is exploited for humorous effect (www.fussballkultur.org).
Interviews as part of football commentary have been investigated in various disciplines (sports studies, media studies and linguistics), which analyzed their quality, their general structure or the use of metaphors. This presentation reports on a study which takes a slightly different focus: as work in progress, it investigates the relationship between the characteristics of interviews with football players after a match and their function for football commentary and the wider social context. The corpus consists of television interviews conducted with players from the German football club FC Bayern München during the 2011 season. The interviews are analyzed using a conversation analytic approach that focuses on the relationship between verbal and visual elements, between micro- and macrostructures and between form and content. The study proposes that interviews with footballers are to be seen as communicative genres in the sense of Bergmann & Luckmann (1995), having an inner structure determined by the choice of linguistic material and an outer structure connecting the genre to a wider social and media context. Furthermore, it is argued that interviews with footballers are a type of reconstructive genre which creates the feeling of an event having been shared by players and audience, thus serving to establish and enact an imaginary community (Chovanec 2008, Mikos 2006). It will be shown that many of the typical – and sometimes criticized – characteristics of those interviews are employed deliberately to manage and maintain parasocial interaction and relationships between players and audience (Gleich 2009). As such, football interviews take their place in the communicative “budget” of a society (Bergmann & Luckmann 1995).
References:
Bergmann, Jörg & Luckmann, Thomas (1995): Reconstructive genres of everyday communication. In: Quasthoff, Uta (ed.): Aspects of Oral Communication. Berlin: de Gruyter, 289-304.
Chovanec, Jan (2008): Enacting an imaginary community: Infotainment in on-line minute-by-minute sports commentaries. In: Lavric et al. (eds.): The Linguistics of Football. Tübingen: Narr.
Gleich, Uli (2009): Nähe trotz Distanz: Parasoziale Interaktionen und Beziehungen zwischen Rezipienten und Sportlern. In Schramm, Holger & Marr, Mirko (eds.): Die Sozialpsychologie des Sports. Köln: Herbert von Halem, 153-175.
Mikos, Lothar (2006): Imaginierte Gemeinschaft. Fans und internationaler Fußball in der reflexiven Moderne. In: Müller, Eggo & Schwier, Jürgen (eds.): Medienfußball im europäischen Vergleich. Köln: Herbert von Halem, 92-119.