Chapter Four
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teams and players. One notable difference between American and British
reports concerns subject-verb agreement involving collective nouns,
specifically soccer team names, which in the UK reports are followed by
plural verbs while, in the US reports by singular verbs. From the cognitive
standpoint, it can be argued that in the British FMRs teams are
conceptualized as groups of people (players) doing things together (this
image is reinforced through the use of the pronoun who in relative clauses)
whereas in the American reports teams are conceived of as single or
impersonal entities. This difference, which is related to the discrepancy
between British and American English usage of collective nouns, is
illustrated by the following examples:
- For all their dominance, Germany were decidedly sloppy at times. (IND)
- Germany was better in the second half, and only outstanding
performances by Mbolhi and his defense kept the score from being more
lopsided. (USA)
On the surface, football lexis does not display significant differences
between American and British English. Basic football terminology is
shared as among the most frequently used content words in both the UK
and US corpora are such items as: goal, minute, game, ball, team, time,
first, second, shot, score, etc. However, some terms are clearly favoured
either by American or British football writers, as is evidenced by Table 2.
The synonymous terms have been arranged in pairs (the figures
correspond to the number of occurrences in either corpus).
A general tendency can be observed with regard to these pairs of
terms: the American sportswriters do not shun from using British terms
(with the exception of dressing room). Naturally, these words and phrases
occur less frequently than their American English synonyms. The reverse
does not hold true for the British football writers, who do not use such
Americanisms as soccer, shoe, cleat, tie (see footnote 5, though), on frame
or locker room. Some of the US soccer terms are derived from popular
American sports: field has been borrowed from baseball, cleat (usually
used in the plural) from American football while shutout is a term used in
baseball and ice hockey. There is yet another American English term
borrowed from ice hockey, i.e. insurance goal – a goal that gives a two-
goal advantage in a soccer game. The phrase is not listed in Table 2 as it is
one of the few US terms that do not have a British English equivalent. The
number of terms that are almost exclusively used in the UK is higher, with
fixture (a game scheduled for a particular day) being a prime example.