The Same Genre for Different Audiences
87The first two lexical units in each frame are in a hyperonymic relation
to the remaining items. Both tables show the same consistent pattern: the
superordinate terms, i.e. ball and pass in the PASS frame as well as shot
and strike in the SHOT frame, occur a little more frequently in the US
reports. By contrast, the hyponyms (terms specifying the kind of pass that
has been played or the kind of shot that has been struck) are more
commonly used in the British FMRs. Out of the nine hyponyms for
ball/pass, six were found to occur more frequently in the UK corpus. In
the SHOT frame this quantitative difference is even more prominent: six
out of the seven hyponyms have higher occurrence rates in the British
FMRs. It seems thus that the American sportswriters are more inclined
than their British colleagues to employ terms with more generic meanings.
The findings from both microanalyses indicate that even though British
and American match reports draw upon the same terminology, they exhibit
differences in the degree of lexico-semantic elaboration (at least within
some domains). The British FMRs are more reliant on figurative language
and have higher occurrence rates for more specialist terms.
Discourse level
The analysis in this section will involve the concepts of explicitness and
implicitness, as understood in cognitive linguistics terms. According to
Baumgarten et al. (2008: 177- 180), these notions can be investigated from
two perspectives. Under the first approach, explicitness is defined as the
“overt encoding of information” (ibid.: 177) while implicitness is
associated with information that needs to be inferred (typically, on the
basis of shared knowledge), is highly context-dependent, and is not
necessarily conveyed by lexico-grammatical structures. From the other
(more global) perspective, explicitness and implicitness are viewed as text
or discourse properties. In a highly explicit text, implicit (contextual)
information is typically fully projected or encoded to allow a proper
understanding of the text. Krüger (2015: 167-175), in his discussion of
explicitness and implicitness, treats them as monodiscursive or
monotextual features^6 that are in constant interaction. In other words, texts
can be analysed as displaying varying degrees of explicitness or
implicitness. By this token, these two phenomena should not be perceived
in terms of a strict dichotomy but in terms of continua: either e-continuum
(^6) In his study, Krüger makes a sharp distinction between explicitness/implicitness
on the one hand and explicitation/implicitation on the other. The latter concepts,
which he also approaches from a cognitive linguistics perspective, are translation
procedures.