COMMUNICATIVE FEATURES OF MODERN FOOTBALL COMMENTARY AS A HYBRID GENRE OF ORAL SPEECH

Abstract

The presented work is focused on the communicative organization of professional football commentary in terms of its syntactic architectonics and verbal means of making an emotional impact on the audience. The article examines linguistic and communicative mechanisms employed by the English language football commentary, while representing dynamics of a sporting event and making it interesting for the mass audience. We have analyzed the speech organization, syntactic architectonics, and communicative patterns that form a hybrid genre of the oral sports media discourse, the latter combining an informative function with the emotional-expressive impact. It is found out that football commentary integrates features of oratory, elements of acting, and conversational communication. Our study bases on the materials of authentic video recording of football commentary performed by Stuart Robson and Derek Ray during the English Super Cup match, It represents a professionally marked type of the spoken discourse with a specific combination of terminological vocabulary, fragmented narrative and emotional lingual means. Our analysis uncovers the ways of verbal reproduction of promptness, dynamics and drama, by means of particular uses of fragmentary utterances, exclamations, incomplete and elliptical constructions that violate the lineal style of the narrative. The use of holistic methodology, which combines pragmatic and surface structure syntactic analysis, made it possible to give a systematic description of the communicative specificity of the genre under study. The article also highlights peculiarities of use of the syntactic speech strategies, and namely, time shifts, the use of the present tense to represent past events, as well as variability of the ratio of simple and complex constructions depending on the game situation. It has been established that the analytical nature of speech at the initial stages of the match is ensured by complex syntactic structures, while at the climaxes of the game the role of simple, fragmentary and exclamatory constructions increases, thus, adding to the tension and drama. Prevalence of declarative sentences combined with the active use of expressive word forms enhances the emotional escalation of the sports commentary. It is summarized that the football commentary appears to be an effective means for modeling a highly intensive competitive process, within which language performs not only an informative but also a suggestive function. The carried out analysis demonstrates that narrative fragmentation, expressive exclamations, and elliptical constructions form a communicative model capable of the quick interpretation of the sports event and its increased emotional perception by the wide audience.