The Same Genre for Different Audiences
81and USA Today are classified as middle-market newspapers, i.e. dailies
that in terms of content combine hard news with entertainment. Detailed
quantitative information on the corpus sources is provided in Table 1.
Daily title Abbr. No. of
reportsWord
tokensWord
typesUK corpusThe Daily
ExpressEXP 48 23,205 3,661The Independent IND 32 23,764 3,802
UK CORPUS
TOTAL- 80 46,969 5,586
US corpusUSA Today USA 48 24,212 3,294
The New York
TimesNYT 32 23,027 3,750US CORPUS
TOTAL- 80 47,239 5,303
Table 1. Quantitative information on the UK and US corpora.
As the data indicate, with approximately 47 thousand word tokens, the
US and UK corpora are almost equal in size. Judging by the difference in
the number of word types (approximately 5%), the British FMRs have a
slightly broader vocabulary range compared to the American reports. To
facilitate quantitative and qualitative contrastive analysis and arrive at
valid findings, both corpora contain reports of the same high-profile
matches, which were played in recent major football tournaments and
competitions, such as the 2012 UEFA European Championship, the 2012-
2013, 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 UEFA Champions League, the 2014
FIFA World Cup, and the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Findings and discussion
The following analysis is subdivided into two parts that correspond to the
levels of lexico-grammar and discourse.
Lexico-grammatical level
At the purely grammatical level the US and UK FMRs exhibit a great deal
of similarity, sharing a number of distinctive features of football reporting,
such as: high proportion of compound and complex sentences (predominantly,
time and relative clauses), frequent occurrence of time and place
adverbials, dense noun phrases and proper nouns that designate football