The same genre for different audiences: A contrastive analysis of American and British football match reports (original) (raw)

In recent years, football language has been the subject of several studies conducted from cognitive linguistics perspectives (cf., e.g., Nordin 2008; Vierkant 2008; Levin 2008; Bergh 2011; Lewandowski 2013). Most of these studies centered on conceptual metaphors in football discourses on the Internet, radio or TV. The present chapter aims to demonstrate how cognitive linguistics methods (frame semantics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory) can be applied in the investigation of football match reports published in American and British dailies. More specifically, its findings come from a contrastive corpus-driven analysis of American and British football match reports extracted from four dailies: USA Today, The New York Times, The Independent and The Daily Express. The chapter focuses on the similarities and differences at the lexico-grammatical, pragmatic and discourse levels. The study has found that major differences occur at the level of pragmatics and discourse. Given the enormous popularity of football in the United Kingdom, British football writers rely on less standard means of expression to reach out to their target audience. Their reports exhibit a greater degree of implicitness, which is reflected by a relatively high proportion of puns (especially in headlines), metonymies and discourse-framing conceptual metaphors. By contrast, as football is not a widely acclaimed sport in the United States, American match reports contain more markers of explicitness, such as conventional and generic vocabulary in headlines and appositive noun phrases to provide necessary elaboration.