Chapter Four
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or i-continuum (Yus 1999: 492-499). Krüger (ibid.) locates explicitness
and implicitness within the cognitive linguistics framework by appealing
to Langacker’s (2008) concepts of profile/base, conceptual substrate and
construal. Under this perspective, the same conceptual content can be
construed in alternate ways. In his discussion of several utterances that
convey the same message, Langacker (2008: 54) argues that “[o]ur shared
apprehension of the situational context provides a conceptual substrate,
various facets of which are overtly expressed”. According to Faber et al.
(2012: 48), “[l]anguage exhibits profiling in the sense that it provides a
range of lexical units and grammatical constructions that encode different
aspects or perspectives of a given scene”. Some aspects may thus be
foregrounded or explicitly profiled, while others may remain hidden.
This approach will be applied in the contrastive analysis of the content
of American and British FMRs. The focus here will be on the ways
football match episodes (i.e. scenes, to invoke a cognitive linguistics term)
as well as football players (main actors) are construed. It will be argued
that the UK and US reports under investigation vary in the extent of
explicitness and implicitness, with the American reports displaying greater
explicitness compared to the British ones. These divergences will be
attributed to the different amounts of domain-related knowledge that is
shared between the sportswriters and their target readers (higher in the
case of UK readers and lower in the case of US readers).
Varying degrees of explicitness/implicitness are demonstrated already
at the level of headlines. In the US corpus headlines, information on the
outcome of the football game (e.g. which team won/lost/progressed to the
next round of the competition or was eliminated from it) is overtly
encoded through the use of lexical units that are commonly associated
with results of sports competitions, e.g., beat, advance, win or draw. In the
British reports, this information is more elusive,^7 and is often conveyed by
metaphorical expressions, some of which are original.^8 The UK headlines
are also marked by broader vocabulary range. Table 6 lists the most
frequently used words in the UK and US headlines (n stands for noun, v
(^7) A similar point is made by Evangelisti Allori (2005: 224): “while the American
headlines are mostly explicit in spelling out ‘who did what, where’ with clear
reference to the event situation [...], the British headlines often rely on word play
which requires knowledge of the world to be made sense of.”
(^8) Novel metaphorical extensions provide evidence for the theory of semantic
generativity, which posits that in specific contexts words can take on completely
new meanings (see example 8 for the illustration of this trend). The theory was
applied in Smith and Montgomery’s (1989) seminal study of sports headlines.