The Same Genre for Different Audiences
89for verb). The lexical items belong to the frames: DEFEAT, DRAW,
ELIMINATION, PROGRESSION, RESULT and VICTORY.
UK corpus US corpusLexical unit No. of occurrences Lexical unitNo. of
occurrencesset up (v) 4 beat (v) 18
victory (v) 4 reach (v) 12
comeback (n) 3 advance (v) 6
fire (v) 3 win (n) 6
rescue (n) 3 eliminate (v) 5
seal (v) 3 draw (n) 4
see (v) 3 top (v) 4
send (v) 3 win (v) 4
sink 3 draw (v) 3
stun (v) 3 lead (v) 3
Table 6. Most frequent lexical units in the UK and US headlines.
Below are three pairs of headlines for the reports of three games:
Barcelona vs. Manchester City, Holland vs. Germany, and Olympiakos vs.
Manchester United.
- Luis Suarez shows his bite with first-half double at the Etihad (EXP)
- Barcelona, Juventus win in Champions League (USA)
- Oranje squeezed out by Germans (EXP)
- Gomez leads Germany past Dutch (USA)
- Goals from Alejandro Dominguez and Arsenal loanee Joel Campbell see
David Moyes’ toothless side tumble to new low (IND) - Olympiakos Beats Manchester United in Champions League (NYT)
Examples 7, 9 and 11, which come from the US reports, provide fairly
explicit information on the outcomes of the games. They should be easy to
understand by lay readers, i.e. people who do not follow soccer news. The
British headlines, by contrast, make much more extensive use of figurative
language and impose greater burden on their readers to decode the key
information. Additionally, examples 6 and 8 rely on ambiguity, wordplay
and humor. The phrase shows his bite may have been purposefully
invoked to refer to previous incidents involving Uruguayan striker Luis
Suarez, who was known for biting opposing players on three different