A Spoken Genre Gets Written: On-Line Football Commentaries in English, French and
Spanish
Carmen Prez Sabater
Gemma Pea Martnez
Ed Turney
Begoa Montero Fleta
Department of Applied Linguistics
Universidad Politcnica de Valencia (Spain)
Biographical notes
Carmen Prez-Sabater, Ph.D., has been lecturing in English for Computer Science at the
Universitad Politcnica de Valencia (Spain), Department of Applied Linguistics, since
1990. She is currently working in the field of Comparative Discourse Analysis and
Computer-Mediated Communication.
Ed Turney, M.A., has been lecturing in English for Computer Science at the Universitat
Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), Department of Applied Linguistics, since 1990. He is
working in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis.
Abstract
Many recent studies on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) have
addressed the question of orality and literacy. This paper examines a relatively recent
subgenre of CMC, that of written on-line sports commentary, which provides us with
written CMC that is clearly based on firmly established oral genres, those of radio and
television sports commentary. The examples analysed are from two English, two French
and two Spanish on-line football (soccer) commentaries. The purpose of the study is to
examine oral traits and genre-mixing in on-line football commentaries in the three
languages as well as carryover from the spoken genres of radio and television
commentaries to this developing genre, following Ferguson (1983). Special attention is
paid to webpage design. The study reveals that form and content of on-line football
commentaries are strongly affected by the style of the online newspaper.
Introduction
In this paper we examine a selection of written on-line newspaper commentaries
of the 2006 Football World Cup. Football (soccer) commentaries are traditionally an
oral genre of radio and television; the 2006 World Cup celebrated in Germany
witnessed the international appearance of written on-line, or minute by minute (MBM),
commentaries. The examples analysed here are from two English, two French and two
Spanish newspapers on-line. The study forms part of an ongoing line of research
centred on the presence of oral traits in written genres of Computer-Mediated
Communication (CMC) in English, Catalan, French and Spanish, as part of the current
process of informalization of general discourse.
The shift towards orality in written and, more generally, public discourse in
English is a well-documented phenomenon and seems to have a long history. Leech
(1966) underlines the tendency towards colloquialisation in public discourse over the
last 200 years and identifies a popular style of communication which might be called
public-colloquial (p. 75). Similarly, Biber and Finegan (1989) describe the general
pattern of drift towards more oral styles (p. 487), in different genres of written
English over the last four centuries. Haussamen (1994) has argued that over the past 400
years, in English, written sentences have tended to become shorter and more direct.
Other scholars that have studied this phenomenon are Chafe and Danielewicz (1987),
Baron (2000) and McWorther (2003).
Examining recent trends in English, Van Dijk (1999) speaks of the blurring of
genres as a result of the new technologies and, within the framework of Critical
Discourse Analysis, Fairclough (1995) has analyzed the process extensively. Fairclough
(1995) has centred upon the processes of informalization/conversationalization and
technologization of discourse, underlining that in modern discourse practices, there are
more and more mixtures of formal and informal styles, technical and non-technical
vocabularies, markers of authority and familiarity, more typically written and more
typically spoken syntactic forms (p. 75), as the distinctions between written and oral
genres become blurred. Fairclough (1989) has also studied the impact on current
discourse practices of discourse technologies, which involve the conscious application
of social scientific knowledge to the production of texts. We have adopted a slightly
different and broader definition of the term technologization to include discourse
practices that have been transformed or rendered possible (which is not the same as
determined) by new technologies. In this context there have been numerous studies
associating CMC with markedly informal styles (Ferrara et al., 1991; Murray, 1991;
Maynor, 1994; Yates, 1996; Baron, 1998, 2000; Crystal 2001; Yus, 2001; Posteguillo,
2003; Prez, 2007).
This process of informalization seems to have deeper historical roots and to
have been particularly rapid over the last thirty years in English, but it has also drawn
the attention of some scholars in the languages related to this paper. Thus, the Catalan
linguist Tuson (2006) points out that, thanks to the new technologies, and despite the
informal style of writing, there has probably never been an epoch in which people,
especially young people, have written so much. As for Spanish, Cervera (2001)
underlines the drift towards orality in the written language. Similarly, Grijelmo (2001),
from a prescriptive perspective, bemoans the informality of written Spanish on the
Internet. Pires (2003) studies the informalization of public discourse in French
journalism and advertising and Armstrong (2004) compares the processes of variation
and levelling in English and French.
It is evident that the phenomenon is a global one and is a clear example of Ongs
(1982) concept of secondary orality in modern societies. While the general process of
Hypotheses
Our main initial hypotheses were that:
1) English CMC would show more oral traits and more evidence of genremixing than French or Spanish.
2) Written commentaries in on-line newspapers would exhibit a significant
carryover from the spoken genres of radio and television commentaries.
match in which the newspapers national team was involved to see if this influences the
commentary.
After examining the whole MBM commentary in each newspaper, the analysis
has centred on the study of the parameters related to the linguistic characteristics of the
commentary using the final 500 words of each MBM commentary. Following Biber
(1988), we considered it more adequate to balance the corpus with the same number of
words in each commentary.
The Spanish newspaper El Pas is the largest selling generalist paid-for
newspaper in Spain with a circulation of 457,675 issues every day. El Mundo is the
second largest with 314,591. Le Monde is one of the leading national daily generalist
newspapers of France selling 400,000 copies every day; LEquipe has an average
circulation of 340,000 issues. The second market leader for broadsheets in Britain is The
Times with a circulation of 692,581 copies per day. The Guardians circulation is
378,000 issues a day (data taken from Wikipedia, July, 2007).
In order to corroborate the first hypothesis, that English CMC would show more
oral traits and more evidence of genre-mixing than French or Spanish, we have
calculated a) the average sentence length and average commentary length (the
commentaries are normally organized into discrete paragraphs), b) non-conventional
indicators of prosody and intonation, c) the amount of colloquial, evaluative and
technical vocabulary, d) the number of fragmentary sentences and e) the use of first and
second person pronouns. Following Chafe & Danielewicz (1987), to evaluate lexis,
each commentary has been coded by at least two of the authors of the paper.
To confirm the second hypothesis, that written commentaries in on-line
newspapers would exhibit a significant carryover from the spoken genres of radio and
television commentaries, we have calculated the number of specialised technical
expressions in the commentary (Ferguson, 1983). We have counted the nonconventional indicators of prosody and intonation. As for syntactic features typical of
sports commentary, and, again, following Ferguson, we have examined a) simplified
sentences, b) the use of inversion i.e. structures in which the predicate precedes the
verb, c) the use of result expressions, d) the presence of heavy modifiers, e) tense usage
and f) the use of routines. We have also examined the use of metaphors in the
commentaries.
Figure 1. El Mundo
Figure 2. El Pas
Thus, in minute 61:29, we find Tarjeta (Card) in the third column and Tarjeta
roja a Rooney (Red card for Rooney) in the fourth. In the description of the incident
itself (minute 60:59) there is no mention of how Rooney fowled the Portuguese player:
Falta de Rooney, ha agredido a Ricardo Carvalho (Fowl by Rooney, he attacked
Ricardo Carvalho), the commentator uses the present perfect tense, used in Castilian
Spanish to describe recent actions in the past in the specific genre of sports
Figure 3. Lquipe
To turn to the French newspapers, both Lquipe and Le Monde use frames.
Lquipes commentary is brief, but does not aspire to the laconic objectivity of El
Pas, as can be appreciated here by the use of evaluative language (Rooney is sent off
after an ugly gesture towards Ricardo Carvalho): the use of the euphemism mauvais
geste is worth noting. The incident is accompanied by an icon indicating the red card.
We have included the comment on the substitution of a Portuguese player to show that
LEquipe uses different font colours to distinguish between types of information.
Figure 4. Le Monde
Both English newspapers use frames so that the commentary appears in the
centre of the browser window, but unlike the French newspapers and El Pas, the
frames are non-scrollable. Neither The Times nor The Guardian uses columns, each
commentary begins with the minute of play in bold type. The Times introduces the
incident with a verbless exclamation in uppercase letters and bold type. It is followed by
a question that is markedly informal (Quirk et al, 1985) and ends with a prosodical use
of punctuation. In both commentaries from The Times, there are indicators of orality in
the informal language: flipped his lid, OK. The incident itself is described using a
neutral word for Carvalhos body part: Rooney stamps on his groin.
The Guardian too relates Rooneys sending in bold type and uses a vocabulary
that is also markedly informal but, unlike the rather middle class language of The Times,
The Guardian uses words that would be considered taboo by many (He stamped on
Carvalho's swingers) or at least demotic: slag off (British slang meaning to denigrate
Hypothesis 1
(The numerical results of the study can be found in tables in the appendixes.)
The figure of 4.6 is calculated if we include the words in the third column in the total number
of words: if we include only the fourth column the sentence length is longer (7.6). It is not intuitively
clear which method is the more adequate.
We have also discounted the frequent, literary, subject verb inversion, with the object
representing direct speech (Quirk et al., 1985, p. 1380) found in The Guardians commentators report of
readers emails of the type "It's Daniel Bedingfield that's gone down injured," chuckles Turner.
Number
of
sentences
Average
sentence
length in
words
Number of
commentaries
Average
commentary
length in
words
Newspaper online
El Pas
26
108
4.6 (7.6)*
48
11.6
El Mundo
21
72
6.9
19
26.3
The Guardian
19
48
10.4
11
45.5
The Times
20
37
13.5
15
33.3
Lquipe
44
40
12.5
25
20
Le Monde
20
33
15.2
18
27.8
Note.The figure of 4.6 is calculated if we include the words in the third column of the
commentary in the total number of words: if we include only the fourth column the sentence
length is longer (7.6).
0
3
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
5
5
348
0
1
2
7
Table C3
Lexis
Newspaper online
El Pas
El Mundo
The Guardian
The Times
Lquipe
Le Monde
Evaluative lexis
Technical lexis
Colloquial
0
12
34
20
19
7
161
63
68
57
71
83
0
25
18
4
7
5
Newspaper online
El Pas
El Mundo
The Guardian
The Times
Lquipe
Le Monde
Fragmentary
sentences
Heavy
modifiers
Present
simple
Present
progressive
Past
Other
75
23
9
6
4
12
54
34
28
17
6
8
38
41
47
46
45
26
0
1
7
3
1
0
0
10
8
7
2
2
13
14
10
7
3
5
Newspaper online
El Pas
El Mundo
The Guardian
The Times
Lquipe
Le Monde
1st person
sing.
1st person
plural
2nd
person
sing.
2nd
person
plural
3rd
3rd
person person
sing.
plural
0
0
6
5
0
0
0
8
2
1
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
1
2
45
69
56
52
49
26
0
9
12
11
2
4
Font of the
commentary
El Pas
Times New
Roman
El Mundo
Verdana
The
Guardian
Arial
The Times
Arial
LEquipe
Arial
Le Monde
Verdana
The figure of 4.6 is calculated if we include the words in the third column in
the total number of words: if we include only the fourth column the sentence length is
longer (7.6). It is not intuitively clear which method is the more adequate.
1
We have also discounted the frequent, literary, subject verb inversion, with the
object representing direct speech (Quirk et al., 1985, p. 1380) found in The Guardians
commentators report of readers emails of the type "It's Daniel Bedingfield that's gone
down injured," chuckles Turner.