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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 889

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

"To be perfectly honest, it just bores the shit out of me!" Ethnographic insights into the post-match interview genre

Authors: File, Kieran A.
Submitted by: File, Kieran A. (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

The post-match interview has become a seemingly obligatory component of the live televised sporting event, yet it has received little attention from researchers in linguistics or other social science disciplines. This presentation will provide an insider perspective into the connection between the game on the pitch and its linguistic representations in the form of this relatively unexplored media genre through an exploration of ethnographic data highlighting attitudes and approaches to the post-match interview held by the stakeholders directly involved in it.

The presentation draws on data from thirty-six ethnographic interviews that were done as part of a wider project exploring the genre of the post-match interview. The stakeholders that were interviewed were involved in one of the following sports: football, rugby, tennis and golf. These stakeholders were sports players, ex-players, broadcast interviewers, journalists, media managers, a sports psychologist and a sports public relations agent.

Drawing primarily on the ethnographic interviews with football stakeholders, and focusing more specifically on the interviewers and interviewees, this presentation will first provide a picture of how stakeholders feel about the post-match interview speech event, highlighting aspects of the social context in which these interviews take place. This will include features such as interviewer and interviewee attitudes and approaches to post-match interviews, beliefs about the purpose of this interview and the dangers they perceive relevant in this context.

Second, the presentation will explore some of the linguistic strategies that speakers employ to negotiate the potentially difficult social context of the football post-match interview. These have been identified from a discourse analysis of a data set of 80 televised post-match interviews.

The findings will be discussed briefly in relation to findings from ethnographic interview data sets and post-match interview data sets from the three other sports (rugby union, tennis and golf). Connections will be made between these complementary data sets for illustrative purposes and in part to highlight the contribution an ethnographic component can make when conducting a genre analysis – a methodological rarity in many approaches to genre analysis.