Literature Review

In this chapter, we introduce the difference between the registers of sports announcer talk. With the help of Ferguson’s overview, we determine the aspect of differentiation. Analyzing Reaser’s research, two broadcasting subregisters are distinguished and defined. One more subregister is introduced in the Lewandowski’s investigation.

Charles A. Ferguson started investigation of sports announcer talk (SAT) in the early 1980s. In “Sports Announcer Talk: Syntactic Aspects of Register Variation” (1983), he defines sportscasting as “the oral reporting of an ongoing activity, combined with provision of background information and interpretation”. At that time fans were used to listening to radio broadcasts rather than to watching TV transmissions. So, the author with his students examines radio recording excerpts of American and Japanese baseball and American football games. Ferguson also clarifies that SAT implies a monolog or a dialog with unknown audience that cannot respond to the reporting. That leads to the formation of specific usage of references to time and space. Ferguson pays attention to six syntactic variables. The first of these is simplification which stands for the deliberate omission of the sentence-initial noun phrase and/or the copula as well as the indefinite article. Then come inversions whereby the announcer emphasizes on the action and takes time to identify its agent. The third variable is result expressions among which the constructions “for + noun” and “to + verb” are the most frequent. Heavy modifiers such as appositional noun phrases, nonrestrictive relative clauses or preposed adjectival constructions, are used solely by the commentators who mastered SAT perfectly. Ferguson’s intuitive findings over tense usage show that Present Simple is used to comment on short actions while prolonged events are described by means of Present Continuous. In their turn, recaps demand Present Perfect. Linguistic routines or clichés are the markers of weak creativity, even though are widely used.

Criticizing Ferguson’s qualitative approach, Reaser tries to differentiate between TV and radio subregisters. He compares TV and radio reports on the college basketball game transmitted by the local broadcasters. Reaser transcribes the commentary and parses it basing on the Ferguson’s variables. He also distinguishes the communicative functions of the commentary: action description, strategy, report, recap, hypothetical, evaluation, and background. The first conclusion Reaser draws is that the TV report covers 4/5 of the radio one. It is due to the fact that TV announcers can focus on the color commentary by means of evaluation, background information or strategy analysis whereas the radio broadcasters are to provide live action description. Moving to the syntactic variables distribution Reaser comes up with the following results. The subject deletion is more frequent on the radio broadcasting then on the TV. However, the copula omission and inversion happen approximately in equal measure on both radio and TV. As for the heavy modifiers, Reaser reveals that it is practically absent on the TV while highly used by the radio broadcasters. Overall, the greater variation of all features for the radio broadcast suggests a higher degree of functionality. All the differences between SAT on the radio and on TV make it reasonable to think of them as subregisters.

Polish linguist Marcin Lewandowski in “The Language of Online Sports Commentary” (2012) recognizes a new variety of sports broadcasting. Online Sports Commentary (OSC) imply short reports published minute by minute, starting some time before the kickoff until the end of the game. Lewandowski tries to answer the question ‘to what extent is OSC a hybrid of features of SAT and written sports commentary (WSC), post-match report including personal evaluation and commentary by the writer?’ First of all, SAT and OSC are similar at the high frequency of present tense. WSC rather implements past tense since the reports are written after the game. Though simplification, including subject omission and copula deletion, emerges in OSC occasionally, comparing to SAT, its frequency is significantly low. OSC lacks subject-verb inversion in comparison with SAT; however, it occurs often enough to be considerable. Signposting devices, such as here, there, still, and now, are less common in OSC and non-existent in WSC. But, serving to “create an impression of shared time and place”, the adverbials are rather frequent in SAT.