Chapter Four
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newspapers. The status of football, or soccer,^4 as the game is most
commonly called in North America, varies between the United Kingdom
and the United States. Association football, as we know it today,
originated in the British Isles, which are thus regarded as the cradle of the
world’s most popular game. It was in England that the rules of football
were codified (in 1863), the first football clubs were established, and the
first competitions were launched. With its long-established tradition,
millions of fans and players, and broad media coverage, football is
arguably the UK’s most popular team sport, ahead of cricket and rugby.
By contrast, in the United States, in terms of popularity, soccer still ranks
behind “traditional” American sports, i.e. American football, baseball,
basketball and ice hockey. Despite the growing interest, football has been
listed as the favorite sport by a mere 2% of the US population (Murray
2014). In view of these socio-cultural factors, it can be hypothesized that
American and British FMRs may exhibit some dissimilarities at the level
of lexico-grammar and discourse. In other words, the key question is: how
do American and British football writers try to reach out to their target
audiences, given that average US and UK readers can differ in the degree
of specialist knowledge?
The ensuing analysis will largely draw upon a number of cognitive
linguistic theories, namely: Conceptual Metaphor Theory, proposed by
Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and developed by KĘvecses (2002, 2005),
Charteris-Black (2004), Semino (2008), and others, and Frame Semantics
(Fillmore 2003 et al.; Schmidt 2008). Central to the latter part of the study
devoted to discourse features will be the phenomena of explicitness and
implicitness, as viewed by Krüger (2015), who draws on the views of
Langacker (2008).
Corpus data
For the purposes of the present study, I have created two FMR corpora,
which will be henceforth referred to as the UK corpus and the US corpus.
Each corpus contains 80 match reports from two newspaper dailies, or –
more specifically – their online sports sections. For the UK corpus, the
data have been derived from The Independent and The Daily Express. In
the case of the US corpus, the material comes from The New York Times
and USA Today. Both The Independent and The New York Times are
liberally-oriented highbrow national papers whereas The Daily Express
(^4) Henceforth football and soccer will be used interchangeably to avoid lexical
repetitiveness. The latter term is derived from the noun association.