1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND
Sports announcers have coloured countless football league games alongside live audiences from stadiums, behind TV screens, to radios. Within this excitement, linguists have also been pulled into the heart of these events but for different reasons. One of the first study regarding this unique language of sports commentary was conducted and documented by Charles A. Ferguson in his article, “Sports Announcer Talk: Syntactic Aspects of Register Variation” in the early 1980s. According to Ferguson (1983), commentary is the oral reporting of a live event that intertwines with background information and analysis. This is more referred to the spoken method of sports broadcasting where these individuals must convey adequate
First, literature reviews regarding sports commentary and its language were referred to obtain a better understanding of previous studies. Secondly, in search for evidences for spoken and written sports commentaries, available online articles and online books were thoroughly studied. Through this step, a number of stylistic differences and linguistic features were listed down. The 1 hour 49 minutes video and online newspaper article regarding the World Cup between Brazil and Germany from the INDEPENDENT website were obtained and studied. For this report paper, I will apply the method of compare and contrast for the two materials and elaborate on the linguistic variation and their
Simple present and present progressive tenses are more commonly used in live sports broadcasting as sportscasters describe events while they are happening. Simple present tense is more often used for short actions such as, “And there Muller loses to Oscar,” while Present Progressive Tense is used for instances that take longer time as in the case, “Oscar making a run down the middle…” On the other hand, past tense is predominantly used in written sports commentary to describe a game. For example, Muller passed to Kroos for the fourth goal. However, through careful observation of the video and article, it is found that sportscasters in TV broadcasting have the tendency to revert to the past tense as used in the newspaper article towards the end of the game. Usually, they replay and focus on certain occasions of the game to provide comments or additional information. For example, “A word on Germany’s performance because it was quite something. They were ruthless, they were clinical. And right from the very