| dc.description.abstract | This MA thesis investigates the various syntactic elements in the register of football commentators to determine the presence of prevailing notions of temporal pressure. More precisely, the register of football commentators is defined as Sports Announcer Talk (SAT). Drawing on the theories of Increment Functional Grammar (IFG), this investigation addresses four research questions concerning on-pitch occurrences, the application of holophrastic utterances, formulaic language, and syntactic characteristics in high-pressure situations.
The study reveals a correlation between the employment of holophrastic utterances by commentators and the statistical metric Expected Goals (xG), wherein a predominant frequency of holophrastic utterances is associated with greater xG values. Furthermore, the prevalence and functions of time expressions are scrutinised, with the conclusion that different roles of commentary (play-by-play and colour commentators) exhibit varying frequencies of expressions. The analysis of formulaic routines in goal-scoring events identifies persistent structures involving player names, goals, metonymic and metaphoric sequences.
Moreover, the pervasive usage of right dislocation (RD) structures is discussed to explore their connection with temporal pressure. This study posits that RD structures are ubiquitous in the SAT register of football commentary contributing to their fluency in both pressurised and unpressurised linguistic settings. Overall, this study establishes the prevalence of temporal pressure in the SAT of football commentators and emphasises the significance of certain syntactic elements in high-pressure situations. | |
