Chapter Four
94
application of the cognitive linguistics methodological apparatus, it has
been found that, compared to the American FMRs, the UK reports make
more extensive use of hyponyms and linguistic metaphors from the
domain of war. By contrast, lexical items with generic meanings occur
more frequently in the US reports.
More interesting findings have been revealed at the discourse level.
The American reports contain a few distinctive features which could be
labelled as markers of explicitness: plain headlines, frequent use of
appositive noun phrases and relative clauses providing supplementary
details, easy-to-follow descriptions of match episodes, and explanations of
more specialist terms. In general, in the US FMRs a greater amount of
contextual information is overtly encoded. The British sportswriters
employ more implicit means of linguistic expression, assuming that their
readers will find it easy to make right inferences. Hence, the discourse of
the British FMRs is marked by unconventional headlines containing
figurative language (including word plays), historical references and
allusions to former players, stronger presence of specialist terminology,
and discourse-framing conceptual metaphors.
Invoking the macroscopic perspective, which sees explicitness and
implicitness as properties of texts and discourses, it can be argued that the
FMRs from the US corpus display greater explicitness than the match
reports from the UK corpus. In terms of their content, the American
reports may be a little more accessible to a lay reader (someone who does
not follow football events). It also seems fair to conclude that one of the
genres of the special language of football exhibits internal variation, which
is related to different degrees of shared background knowledge. Finally,
the phenomena of explicitness and implicitness (and their markers)
deserve further investigation in the context of special language research.
References
Andrews, P. 2005. Sports Journalism: A Practical Introduction. London:
SAGE Publications.
Baumgarten, N., B. Meyer and D. Özçetin. 2008. “Explicitness in
Translation and Interpreting: A Critical Review and Some Empirical
Evidence (of an Elusive Concept).”Across Languages and Cultures
9(2): 177-203.
Bergh, G. 2011. “Football is war: A case study of minute-by-minute
football commentary.” Veredas 15: 83–93.
Bergh, G. and Ohlander, S. 2012. “Free kicks, dribblers and WAGs.
Exploring the language of “the people’s game”. Moderna språk 106/1: