A Contrastive Analysis of the Language of Sports Commentary on Televised Football Matches in Egyptian Arabic and British English.

Research Abstract

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 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. Analysis of the English and Arabic corpora reveals striking similarities between the two languages particularly in the way the English and Arabic commentators use the selected linguistic devices to serve different functions. Key words: Sports-in-media, discourse analysis, monologic discourse, sports discourse, football commentary.

Research Keywords

A Contrastive Analysis of the Language of Sports Commentary on Televised Football Matches in Egyptian Arabic and British English.