A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LANGlJAGE OF i :. SPORTS COMMENTARY ON TELEVISED FOOTBALL MATCHES IN EGYPTIAN ARABIC AND BRITISH ENGLISH

Abstract

The massive media coverage of most sports events, the large amounts of money invested in sport, as well as the huge audience sport draws make of sports­ in-media an area worth studying. Televised sports commentary, the focus of the present study, represents a type of monologic discourse where the mass media audience is not co-present in the commentator's physical context and hence commentators cannot interact either verbally or nonverbally with the remote home viewers. The present study aims to identifY the characteristic linguistic features of televised football commentary. Certain salient discoursal and syntactic devices are analyzed in British English and Egyptian Arabic football commentary as relevant to certain discoursal functions which are themselves very much related to the nature of televised football commentary. These discoursal fimctions include coping with ' the fast pace of action, involving the audience, and identifYing participants. The

present study reaches significant findings concerning the nature and characteristics of this type of discourse. Analysis of the English and Arabic corpora reveals striking similarities berween the two languages particllllarly in the way the English and Arabic commentators use the selected linguistic devices to serve different functions. The insignificant difference discerned whrn analyzing the English and .. Arabic corpora highlights the universal nature of this r:pe of discourse which partly stems from the nature ofthgame itself as well as the medium. However, similarity

,. can be traced to the fact that commentators, regardless of the language used in commentary, draw upon certain linguistic conventions i!hat help them in their task.