Gap-fillers in Russian and English football commentaries

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

School of Foreign Languages

Bachelor's thesis

Gap-fillers in Russian and English Football Commentaries

Field of study: Linguistics

Degree programme: Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication

Victoria V.

Moscow, 2020



Abstract

The increased popularity of sports TV coverage has aroused considerable scientific interest in sports discourse, particularly in the register of Sports Announcer Talk (SAT) and football commentary. The present thesis project aims to identify the specific features of using gap-fillers in Russian and English football commentaries. A number of studies on football linguistics are addressed within the theoretical framework of this research in order to define the concept of a gap-filler and establish its main functions. In this respect, special focus is placed on the division of football commentary into the play-by-play announcing (PP) and color commentary (CC). The present work regards a sports commentator as the basic producer of sports discourse and tries to establish a connection between a commentator's language personality and their choice of gap-fillers. When introducing a gap-filler, commentators need to preserve the semantic and syntactic unity of the text, so, this study applies discourse analysis to investigate the ways to successfully incorporate prepared elements into spontaneous speech. Since the research is conducted in the context of Russian and English commentaries, it reveals the similarities and differences of these sportscasting traditions. The research also evaluates the quantity of gap-fillers in the analyzed football commentaries, which is supposed to stress the significance of prepared elements in game coverage. Although limited in scope, the study may add to the body of research on the topic and contribute to training future linguists, journalists and sportscasters.

Key words: gap-fillers, sports discourse, football commentary, play-by-play, color commentary, language personality



Contents

Introduction

1. Analysis of the match between Denmark and France, World Cup 2018

1.1 General description of the game

1.2 Commentators' language personalities

1.3 Analysis of gap-fillers and their functions within the commentary

1.4 Analysis of the ways to combine gap-fillers with spontaneous discourse

1.5 Timing of gap-fillers

2. Analysis of the match between Barcelona and Paris Saint Germain, Champions League 2017

2.1 General description of the game

2.2 Analysis of commentators' language personalities

2.3 Analysis of gap-fillers and their functions within the commentary

2.4 Analysis of the ways to combine gap-fillers with spontaneous discourse

2.5 Timing of gap-fillers

3. Analysis of the match between Brazil and Argentina, Superclбsico 2019

3.1 General description of the game

3.2 Analysis of commentators' language personalities

3.3 Analysis of gap-fillers and their functions within the commentary

3.4 Analysis of the ways to combine gap-fillers with spontaneous discourse

3.5 Timing of gap-fillers

4. Analysis of the match between Arsenal and Newcastle, Premier League 2020

4.1 General description of the game

4.2 Analysis of commentators' language personalities

4.3 Analysis of gap-fillers and their functions within the commentary

4.4 Analysis of the ways to combine gap-fillers with spontaneous discourse

4.5 Timing of gap-fillers

Conclusion

References

Introduction

In today's world sport forms an integral part of many spheres of life: entertainment, business, education etc. (Coakley, 2001, p. 79). Indeed, the massive investment into the sports domain has accelerated its development and popularization (Beard, 1998). According to Beard (ibid), the most popular sport, receiving the greatest extent of media coverage, is football. This can be justified by the fact that football fans, both attending stadiums and watching games at home, constitute the audience larger than that of any other sport (Richard, 2008, p. 193).

Actually, the advanced filming technology has enhanced the quality of football broadcast and increased the number of games covered on TV. The rising popularity of football has attracted much scientific interest to sports discourse, particularly to football linguistics. Within this field of research, a substantial number of studies have focused on football commentary (Gerhardt, 2008; Mьller, 2007; Lewandowski, 2008).

In fact, scholars address different aspects of football commentary. For instance, several works have investigated how time limit influenced the commentators' choice of vocabulary and syntactic units (Mьller, 2007; Mьller & Mayr, 2007). Additionally, some researchers have studied patterns utilized by announcers unconsciously, for example, unintended referents to players' race (Haskell, 2009). Besides, deviations in the spontaneous part of sports commentary have served as another topic for research (Makarova, 2008). Commentators' personal features, expressed in the commentary both explicitly and implicitly, i.e. their language personalities, have also gained much scientific attention (Asmus, 2016; Karaulov, 1987). Other studies have concentrated on the prosody of football commentary, i.e. its rhythm, tempo, the loudness of a commentator's voice and so on (Ferguson, 1983; Kern, 2010).

Apart from that, scientists speculate on the structure of football commentary, dividing it into the play-by-play announcing and color commentary (Ferguson, 1983; Gerhardt, 2008). Generally speaking, whereas the play-by-play part implies direct reporting on the events which take place on the field, the color commentary involves expert analysis of certain game episodes. However, although these types of commentary are separated from the theoretical perspective, they do intersect in real life. The thing is that football commentary represents a unique genre of sports report, merging spontaneous speech with prepared information (Fatkullina & Khabirov, 2015); and both play-by-play and color commentators are inclined to use such prepared elements, or gap-fillers as termed further in this paper, to fill in the pauses which occur in the course of the game.

Nowadays the topic of gap-fillers remains understudied. Having conducted extensive research on the topic, I have not encountered works which investigate the nature of gap-fillers or their functions in football commentary. Therefore, the aim of my study is to identify specific features of gap-fillers in the context of Russian and English football commentaries and analyze the ways to combine them with spontaneous flow of speech. Besides, in the framework of my study, I assume that not only do gap-fillers involve prepared data such as players' biographies or references to other games, but they also incorporate any data that cannot be regarded as pure play-by-play or color commentary.

The present work focuses on the following research questions: 1) What types of gap-fillers can be distinguished and what functions do they perform? 2) How can a commentator's language personality predetermine the choice of a particular gap-filler? 3) What are the ways of embedding gap-fillers in football commentary? 4) Does the use of gap-fillers differ in Russian and English commentaries? 5) What part of the commentary do gap-fillers constitute?

To answer the abovementioned questions, I analyze four commentaries of football games both in Russian and English. First of all, I identify the general qualities of each match and the sportscasters' types of language personality. Then, I transcribe fragments of the commentary which contain gap-fillers. After that, I determine the type of a particular gap-filler and its function using descriptive and data sampling methods. The same methods are applied to analyze the connection between the commentator's qualities and the choice of certain gap-fillers. Having gathered the data, I perform discourse analysis to identify the techniques which help commentators to maintain semantic and syntactic integrity of the text when introducing a gap-filler. Lastly, I utilize statistical methods to establish the ratio between gap-fillers and other types of commentary. As the game usually grows tenser in the second half and starts to speak for itself, the following hypothesis emerges: The timing of gap-fillers in the first half will exceed that in the second. Nevertheless, above all, this quantitative approach allows to evaluate the general significance of gap-fillers in the coverage of a football match.

The study may shed light on the specific nature of using gap-fillers in football commentary and may form the basis for future linguistic works. Moreover, it might turn useful for educating journalists and sports commentators.

Literature review

Discourse, sports discourse and discourse analysis

Notion of discourse

Since TV football commentary forms part of sports discourse, it seems logical to begin the literature review with clarifying the notions of discourse, sports discourse and discourse analysis.

In modern linguistics there has been much controversy over the definition of discourse due to its multidimensional nature. The term is literally defined as “a serious speech or piece of writing on a particular subject” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2001, p. 338). In its broadest sense, discourse may refer to any form of naturally occurring language (Brown & Yule, 1983). Carter (1993) states that the notion “discourse” is occasionally used to refer to spoken utterances while the term “text” is employed to describe written speech. He also views the “discourse/text' relationship through `process/product' prism.” (ibid)

Some scholars stress the significance of the non-linguistic aspect in the production of discourse. For instance, when describing theoretical approaches to sports discourse, Shpodarenko (2015) above all sticks to Arutyunova's definition of discourse, who addresses it as “the coherent text in aggregate with extra-linguistic, pragmatical and other factors; the text taken in event aspect, the speech considered as purposeful social action, as the component participating in interaction of people and the mechanism of their consciousness”. Fairclough (2003) also investigates the social nature of discourse. Actually, he makes a reference to the studies by Archer and Sayer who “distinguish two causal `powers' which shape texts: on the one hand, social structures and social practices; on the other hand, social agents, the people involved in social events” (ibid, p. 22). In other words, it is the communicative context and the participants of discourse that determine its aim, structure and other features.

Following the socio-pragmatic approach to discourse, researchers distinguish the concept of institutional discourse. Karasik (1992) claims that institutional discourse is limited by status-role relationship of interlocutors. Although the domain of sport has gained insufficient research in terms of discourse sociolinguistics, sports discourse, football commentary in particular, can be classified as institutional because it is bound to participants' roles: it is produced by a commentator and is directed at the viewer.

From a different perspective, sports discourse belongs to the category of institutional discourse since it possesses such shared characteristics of the group as action-oriented nature, transparency, unity, cohesion and discreteness (Gavryushina, 2016). Among other features from the list, the orientation of sports discourse on certain actions can be most distinctly observed within sports commentary or the interaction between sportsmen and coaches. Additionally, Kudrin (2011) underlines that sports discourse, as a set of communicative practices, has evolved in the course of the development of sport in society and is predetermined by a number of extra-linguistic factors. Indeed, as sport is continuously strengthening its position in people's lives, new roles of the participants and types of their possible interaction emerge. Only a decade ago, for instance, there were no agents in junior football but now they are in great demand and their communication either with young athletes or football clubs forms a significant part of sports discourse.

Moreover, the term `discourse' is also often applied to specific areas of language use, that is why such notions as political discourse or media discourse can be distinguished. Sharafutdinova (2010) assumes that sports discourse is a thematic variety of media discourse. Indeed, nowadays a commentator is thought to be the basic producer of sports discourse despite the fact that sports commentary as a profession originally emerged in the sphere of journalism and, accordingly, within media discourse (Guttsait, 2012). Being a middle agent between the participants of a sports event and the viewers, a sportscaster enriches the televised communication with their personal perception of the game, mental experience, emotions, and just as important, mastery of language (ibid). From this standpoint, a commentator becomes a fully-fledged co-author of the media product, namely the TV coverage of a football match.

Discourse analysis

Since this study aims to examine sports discourse, the term “discourse analysis” needs to be specified. Stubbs (1983, p. 8) refers to discourse analysis as the effort to investigate the structure of language above the clause or the sentence, and therefore, to analyze larger language units like dialogical patterns or written texts. It is worth noting, though, that discourse analysts do not typically study invented texts; they are more inclined to focus on the language which occurs in real life.

Schiffrin (2006) follows the aforementioned definition and characterizes discourse analysis as `the study of language use above and beyond the sentence'. According to her early studies (Schiffrin, 1994), there exist two approaches to discourse analysis: the formal approach and the functional approach. The formal approach suggests that discourse analysis concentrates on the interconnectedness of discourse units which are generally situated above the structural level of sentences (ibid). In other words, the formal approach defines the rules, the implementation of which will result in a well-structured text. From the functional point of view, discourse analysis is viewed as the study of the communicative function of a text produced in a particular environment (ibid). Indeed, Van Els et al (1984, p. 94) claim that “the study of language in context will offer a deeper insight into how meaning is attached to utterances than the study of language in isolated sentences.”

Further, in the “Methods” section I elaborate on the implementation of discourse analysis in my study.

Sports Announcer Talk (SAT)

Much scientific research has been dedicated to establishing connection between discourse and media, especially in terms of ideology and power (Sandvoss, 2003). Here, however, we speak of the relationship between media and sports discourse, the product of which is TV coverage of a sports event accompanied by professional commentary.

Actually, during live broadcasts, it is sports commentators who communicate and interpret the action to television audience. This process of oral reporting of a current activity alongside with its interpretation and provision of background information is referred to as sports announcer talk, or SAT (Ferguson, 1983).

SAT represents a register of sports discourse, which means that it is bound to a particular communicative context. Halliday & Hasan (1985, p.41) describe a register as “a variety [of language] according to use” which depicts “the different types of social activity that people commonly engage in”. Ferguson (1983) holds the view that a register of a particular linguistic action possesses such characteristics as a specific purpose and a unique form which are not encountered in other registers. Furthermore, the participants of a register share “the body of knowledge and values” (ibid, p. 158). In addition, the term register is sometimes referred to as genre (Lee, 2001, p. 41). Fairclough (2003, p. 26) notes that whereas discourse is a wider concept which implies “ways of representing”; genres are “ways of acting”. Thus, sports announcer talk, or football commentary in particular, represent “ways of (inter)acting discoursally” (ibid).

The language output in SAT is primarily conditioned by the extralinguistic context, in this instance a game, which makes the register different from many others of the kind. For this reason, SAT is consequently divided into several subtypes, based upon the kind of sport covered and media type: television, radio, newspaper etc. (Ferguson, 1983).

TV football commentary is one of SAT dimensions. In a literal sense, commentary can be regarded as a description of events serving for illustration or explanation (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Crystal & Davy (1969, p.125) understand commentary as “a spoken account of events which are actually taking place”. Mьller (2007) expands their definition by saying that sports commentary comprises unprеmeditated reactions, i.e. for the most part spontaneous reporting, to extralinguistic reality - the game. So, the aforementioned scholars share the opinion that commentary consists in the improvised report on live events.

In sports domain, the term sportscasting, adapted by Ferguson (1983), is applied as a synonym to sports commentary. Beyond that, Ferguson (ibid, p. 156) remarks that commentary is directed towards “unknown, unseen, heterogeneous audience”. This means that although sportscasters communicate the message to the audience, they cannot rely on any immediate feedback in order to evaluate the degree of comprehension. However, despite the fact that nowadays this statement still holds true, the commentators working specifically for sports channels possess a larger amount of shared knowledge with their viewers as opposed to those sportscasters covering games on central television.

Anyway, TV coverage of a football game is supposed to reach viewers in both auditory and visual ways thanks to a combination of commentary and image displayed by camera. To attract and occupy the audience's attention, a sportscaster has to perform a number of functions described in the next section.

Functions of modern sports commentary

Being the most popular sport, football affects the viewers in a variety of ways. Patton (1984, p. 5) cites a National Football League Commissioner who said that throughout a football match “you watch a news story develop while you are being entertained”.

Indeed, when interpreting the image on the screen, the commentators perform a set of different functions. Cellini (1997) claims that sportscasters are to carry out three overlapping tasks: to supply the audience with information; to enhance viewers' comprehension within the sports event; and to entertain using appropriate verbal and prosodic patterns. According to Raider (1984), decades ago the key role of a commentator was more of an entertainer than of a reporter. He highlights, however, that television adopted the radio policy to reward those sportscasters who also managed to promote sports facilities along with sponsors' advertisements. From this perspective, a commentator also played the role of an advertiser (ibid).

Ziyangirov (2017) extends the list of the functions of modern sportscasting. Apart from the informative function and entertaining function, he mentions explanatory function, analytical function and the function of arousing interest to sports and healthy lifestyle (ibid). Below, I am going to clarify each of them.

The informative function implies provision of new data by reporting of what is happening on the pitch. The explanatory function consists in the interpretation of some game episodes, which is of special value when the coverage takes place somewhere other than a sports channel. Performing the entertaining function, a commentator fills their speech with stylistic devices so as to amuse spectators and keep their attention.

The function of arousing interest to sports speaks for itself: it raises viewers' awareness of the benefits of doing sports. As for the analytical function, a commentator often tries to look deeper into disputable moments and provide their personal evaluation (Ziyangirov, 2017). This may be realized through either a reasoning monologue or a dialogue with a co-commentator, usually being an expert in the given sport. (Yurkovskij, 1988; Volodina, 2011)

Besides, one particular function may predominate in sports commentary. For instance, if a sports event is characterized by a rapid change of events, the commentator will concentrate mostly on the informativeness of his or her message. In fact, the features of a certain match dictate the pragmatic orientation of the commentary together with its structure.

Game qualities and commentary structure

Sports commentary is quite diverse in its nature. Actually, not only do commentaries differ in the distribution of functions, but the very structure of the talk depends on the type of sport being covered and the phase of a sports event.

The general pattern of sports commentary is as follows:

1) welcoming part;

2) introduction of a sportscaster's interlocutor (if there is one);

3) a brief message about the game and the surrounding conditions;

4) commentary on the sports event itself;

5) interviews with the participants or with the coaching staff;

6) announcement of the upcoming events;

7) final part.

Whereas this scheme remains, by and large, quite stable, the coverage of the fourth point - the commentary itself - differs from sport to sport. Thus, as cited by Ziyangirov (2017, p. 463), a well-known English football commentator John Motson devised a classification of sports affecting sportscasting. Having considered the speed and dynamics of various sports, he divided them into fast, rhythmic and slow (ibid). According to the above-mentioned classification, football, hockey and basketball belong to the fast sports; tennis, volleyball or figure skating comprise the rhythmic ones; open water swimming or race-walking constitute the slow type (ibid).

I assume that commentary of each of the sports types is to a greater extent directed at performing one of the functions: informative, explanatory, entertaining etc. This happens primarily due to the differences in the time limit and in the possible number of pauses. Consequently, the coverage of fast sports above all focuses on the informative function as the rapidly changing scene of the game requires direct reference to the events on the pitch, rink or court. Commentating of the other two types, in contrast, does not pay so much attention to the informative function, combining it with the other ones.

Nevertheless, Ziyangirov (2017) insists that football is a less dynamic sport than hockey or basketball, so despite being part of the fast group, it affects commentary a bit differently, shifting the focus from the informative function to other ones presented above. In fact, the informative function of football commentary consists mostly in a detailed reporting on the resultative attacks which occur in the course of the match. More than that, as compared to hockey or basketball, football lacks resultative combinations, that is why a sportscaster is tempted to emphasize goals to the best of his or her emotionality (Makarova & Pyatkov, 2018).

Indeed, sports of a slower character exhibit the heterogeneity of game moments most clearly. In other words, the pace may differ not only from sport to sport but also from episode to episode within one performance. Based on this observation, researchers distinguish several phases of a game: active and passive phases and the after-action report (Beard, 1998). The active phase implies full coverage of the events happening on the pitch: unexpected scores, a series of attacks, debatable violations of the rules and so on. On the contrary, all the insipid moments constitute the passive phase. Football commentators, for example, are tempted to refer to the resultative episodes during the passive phase to avoid long silent stretches. Lastly, the after-action report includes the analysis of exciting or questionable matters, often repeated in slow motion (Ziyangirov, 2017).

Over time the coverage of each of the outlined phases has acquired its own distinct characteristics, which imply the use of a specific set of linguistic tools. The commentary of the active phase, for example, is usually presented in the form of narration or description as opposed to the passive one which involves detailed reasoning. Thus, scholars have come to the conclusion that sports commentary reaches its maximum effectiveness when it is divided into play-by-play announcing and color commentary, usually performed by different people.

Play-by-play announcing and color commentary

The structure of sports commentary has undergone a number of fundamental changes in the course of time. Actually, the improved quality of TV image eliminates the necessity of commentator's constant presence, which has resulted in the increased frequency of pauses in reporting. Besides, whereas in the past the key function of sports commentary was merely to inform spectators of the events happening right away (Crystal & Davy, 1969), the technical opportunities of today's TV broadcasting have allowed a commentator to fulfil other functions: to provide critical analysis of game episodes, to include entertaining elements in the speech etc. These changes have led to the division of modern commentary into two types: the `play-by-play' commentary (PP) and `color' commentary (CC) (Ferguson, 1983; Delin, 2000; Mьller, 2007). Generally speaking, play-by-play announcing focuses on what events take place, where and when; and color commentary is supposed to reveal why they happen.

The term play-by-play was firstly introduced in 1927 meaning “being or giving a running commentary on a sports event” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Crystal (2003) notes that play-by-play reporting is presented in a formulaic form, i.e. broadcasters use some standard expressions to focus on specific actions on the field or signpost various phases of the game. The discourse structure of such commentary is cyclical since most sports involve cycles of repeated actions, limited in their number (Crystal, 2003). In football, for instance, sportscasters mostly focus either on player's actions (go over the goal line, pass the ball etc.) or on a referee's actions (give a penalty kick, award a corner kick etc.)

Color commentary is frequently referred to as `color-adding' commentary (Crystal, 2003) or `pundit' commentary (Chovanec, 2016). Crystal (2003) claims that pure color commentary “provides an audience with pre-event background, post-event evaluation, and within-event interpretation”. Chovanec (2016) shares this point of view, stating that pundits, or experts in the field, are invited specifically to clarify debatable moments to the inexperienced audience. Nevertheless, not only do color commentators provide expert analysis of the match, but they are also expected to present statistics and players' biographical data along with any insights to embellish game coverage (Cellini, 1997).

In fact, as noted by Johnstone (2016), discourse is affected by both language input and the manner in which interlocutors organize it. Indeed, every live broadcast production has its own elaborate structure that must be strictly followed for the coverage to succeed despite the on-air format. The organizational pattern of football commentary, for example, demands greater presence of a color commentator in the first part to build up the narrative of the game (Johnstone, 2016). In the second half, conversely, more silent moments between stretches of live report are acceptable (ibid).

However, some scholars hold the view that it is a combination of exciting and boring moments that affects the distribution of play-by-play and color-adding commentary in the first place. Gerhardt (2008) identifies and analyzes the moments when one type of commentary switches to another. In her opinion, the necessity to change the style of reporting occurs because of the pauses between game phases or the omission of events which do not affect the match outcome (ibid). The reverse shift happens when reporters need to outline which team possesses the ball or when the game starts to gain momentum. Yet, she points out that the pause made by a commentator awaiting the subsequent moves of the athletes should not be considered as the moment of switching from PP to CC (ibid). On the whole, the choice of the reporting mode very much depends on what objectives a commentator wants to accomplish at a certain point of the game.

The thing is that each of the commentary types aims at performing particular SAT functions discussed above. Thus, play-by-play announcing first of all aims to communicate the data to viewers, i.e. perform the informative function. The entertaining function of this reporting type should also be noted as commentators need to draw and hold the audience's attention.

Color commentary, on the other hand, entails expert examination of some doubtful game moments, thereby performing analytical and explanatory functions above all the others. More than that, by referencing past tournaments or outstanding personalities to support their analysis, color commentators may implicitly fulfil the function of arousing interest to sports. Indeed, on hearing unfamiliar though intriguing information, a viewer may devote some time to the exploration of the topic, thus unintentionally getting involved into sports.

Gerhardt's (2008) point of view is elaborated by investigating the structure of sports commentary from the perspective of the game division into active, passive and after-report phases. Actually, it may be logically assumed that the active phase is predominantly accompanied by PP because at this stage every move of the players might affect the outcome of the match and, accordingly, should be reported by a sportscaster. Conversely, the passive phase is dominated by color-adding commentary as the lack of meaningful live events requires filling the air-time with other types of data. Lastly, the action-replay phase is more often dedicated to the expert evaluation of the moment, but nonetheless, its repeated, more detailed, coverage cannot be excluded.

In fact, Rufaidah & Abeer (2019) correlate the active and passive phases with the play-by-play and color commentaries distinguished by Ferguson (1983), claiming that Beard (1998) just added one more phase - the action-replay commentary - to the already existing two.

Nevertheless, the distinction between these two modes of sportscasting becomes most evident when two commentators report on a game, one being the prime, or play-by-play, sportscaster, who occupies the greater part of the air time, and the other - a co-commentator, or color commentator, who gives expert analysis and evaluation of game episodes.

In fact, such role distribution has become a conventional practice in modern sports commentary. The tradition of two commentators cooperating in a booth emerged in America and changed the entire communicative context of sports announcing (Denu, 2010). A research, conducted about 40 years ago (Bryant, Comisky, & Zillman, 1977), demonstrated that the commentary of a football match was dominated by play-by-play announcement. In fact, the ratio of play-by-play to color commentary was around 7:3 (ibid). Billings, Butterworth, & Turman (2015) claim that this proportion still holds true although the boundaries between commentators' roles are becoming increasingly blurred. Nonetheless, the demand for expert evaluation and other extra data has only been rising because the viewers have become more inquisitive and nowadays it is more complicated to satisfy their needs.

In Russia, for instance, the tradition of collective commentary has not been officially acknowledged. A second commentator is typically invited for coverage of major competitions such as World Cups or the finals of national leagues. This is usually done in order to capture all the significant moments of the game.

Still, having watched plenty of football games, I have noticed that commentators tend to switch two types of reporting even working in a pair, i.e. each of the two sportscasters displays both play-by-play and pundit commentaries. More than that, play-by-play journalists also tend to appeal to players' personal data or other relevant information from the football domain to entertain the viewers and fill in long silent stretches, yet not analyzing disputable matters.

From these observations the following conclusions can be drawn: either the commentators' role distribution is not that strict and play-by-play announcers just borrow a part of color commentary or such fillers as, for instance, biographical data or quotations constitute a separate category of elements which are exercised in both types of commentary.

I am inclined to stick to the second option, and therefore, I propose that this study addresses gap-fillers, e.g. facts from athletes' biographies, references to other matches, weather description etc., at least in isolation from expert commentary.

Gap-fillers

Ryzhikova (2018) claims that such linguistic activity as football commentary cannot be considered as absolutely spontaneous since it as well contains a number of prepared elements. She states that in preparation for reporting a commentator searches for data that might prove useful - particular facts from the tournament history, players' personal data etc. Ziyangirov (2017, p. 462) defines sportscasting as a direct broadcast of a game together with elements of authorial improvisation and commentary based on the information prepared beforehand.

What can be considered as a gap-filler? Since I introduce the pioneering idea of gap-fillers as a separate category of elements in sports discourse, I define them as a group of speech constituents incorporating prepared references to a relevant piece of news, a historical event, players' biographical data etc. alongside improvised commentary of the pop-up boxes or weather description. Indeed, the category of gap-fillers involves any information that is not considered as pure PP or CC.

The following sentences are the examples of gap-fillers in the commentary of the match between West Ham United and Arsenal (Premier League 2012-2013):

“He got bumped out last season, it's a new challenge for him…”;

“These London rivals have been playing against each other since unofficial friendlies back in 1996…”;

“Twenty-one goals already today…”

Within a commentary gap-fillers can be expressed by:

a subordinate clause: “This is Thiago Silva, for whom it went very well in the first game back there.”;

a sequence of sentences: “They were coming to the tournament without their first choice left back. And they are still waiting for their forward to recover from Manchester city. That night it was a game full of pain.”;

an elliptical sentence: “Sidibй and Lemar - both on their way to Atlйtico Madrid.”;

a dialogic fragment: “Are you going to hold this tournament until Messi wins for the national team? - Yes, while there are matches, Messi will play. We believe that Messi continues to play for Argentina…”;

any other form chosen by a commentator.

How are gap-fillers incorporated into sports commentary? Commentators often link these elements either to the object displayed on the screen or to the player, or players, who draw the viewers' undivided attention at some particular point of the game. To this end, they evaluate the relevance of fillers to the given communicative situation and use implicatures along with a range of cohesive devices. The ways to combine gap-fillers with spontaneous discourse will be discussed in detail in the following section. Indeed, gap-fillers serve to keep the commentary grammatically and semantically complete, filling in extra pauses. Moreover, gap-fillers help commentators to set credibility, to confirm the status of a professional in the field (Asmus, 2016). Therefore, the following functions of gap-fillers from a sportscaster's perspective can be distinguished: the credibility function and the function of maintaining the integrity of commentary.

Besides, the extra information used to fill in the pauses may also affect the audience's perception of the match. Basically, two main functions directed at the viewer can be singled out: the informative function and the entertaining function. The former one involves all ways of expanding the audience's knowledge on the topic: provision of data from players' biographies, quotations of famous personalities, references to past tournaments and so forth. The latter function consists in generating and keeping the viewers' interest in the game as well as in expanding a sportscaster's role beyond simple retelling of the match. In addition, gap-fillers can fulfil the explanatory function in cases when a commentator needs, for instance, to interpret a referee's choice or a team's playstyle to the viewers.

Incorporating gap-fillers into football commentary

Discourse analysts pay much attention to the communicative function of naturally occurring language, and one of their main objectives is to evaluate the effectiveness of communication within a discourse. In fact, a communicative act can be considered effective if the recipient of the message is able to decode, or comprehend, it to the fullest extent. Successful discourse comprehension very much depends on how interlocutors structure their message. Thus, when introducing gap-fillers, commentators need to preserve the integrity and comprehensibility of the whole text. To study the ways to incorporate gap-fillers into sports commentary, I need to address sports discourse in terms of coherence and cohesion.

De Beaugrande & Dressler (1981) describe text as a communicative event that possesses certain characteristics - standards of textuality - with coherence and cohesion among others. From their point of view, coherence is the language mechanism that allows for integral comprehension of the concepts and relations configuration which forms the internal basis of discourse (ibid). Regarding cohesion, the authors claim that this standard of textuality reveals the connections of the surface components, i.e. actual words and phrases, which are combined within a sequence (ibid).

The followers of the functional approach to discourse claim that acceptability of discourse, i.e. its characteristic of being subject to comprehension, can be measured according to the extent of coherence between its constituent parts (Blakemore, 2001). Actually, coherence is understood as the result of making a text semantically meaningful; and as far as football commentary is concerned, it implies the viewers' ability to understand sportscasters' speech correctly. To sound clear for the audience, commentators rely on the concepts of implicature and relevance.

Implicature is information which is suggested in a sentence but is not expressed explicitly (Baker & Ellece, 2011). Implicatures to a great extent depend on the contextual knowledge and experience of the recipient since they cannot be decoded applying logical deduction (ibid). In the framework of sports discourse, commentators may refer to some outer events though not specifying them: “Eh, today we won't be able to look at the confrontation between Neymar and Kevin Trapp” (Brazil vs. Argentina, 2019). Here, a commentator refers to Neymar's recent injury and his absence in the lineup for this match.

Moreover, inappropriate information may violate the coherence of the text, and in this regard, it seems essential to specify what data commentators find relevant to the moment being reported.

The notion of relevance is applied in discourse analysis to describe the result of an operation by which a recipient of discourse assigns some degree of importance to one or several of its properties (Van Dijk, 1974.). Van Dijk (ibid) presumes that relevance could be assigned merely to semantic structures while phonetic, stylistic, rhetorical and other devices serve to signpost relevant elements in discourse.

The researcher also distinguishes three levels for relevance assignment: words within a sentence, a sequence of sentences, discourse in its entirety (ibid). Firstly, the sentence level implies traditional relevance assignment according to the `topic-comment' distribution, where the `comment' position implies the introduction of unknown information and can be emphasized by contrastive stress (ibid). Thus, in a sentence like: “Paris Saint Germain remained unbeaten in the last 16 matches” - the `comment' function is assigned to the part “remained unbeaten in the last 16 matches” (Barcelona vs. PSG, 2017). Van Dijk (1974) also points out that local from the formal perspective, relevance within a sentence is actually of a sequential character. This means that the topic, “Paris Saint Germain”, is familiar to the recipient because it has been already mentioned previously in the text.

Secondly, on the level of sentence sequences, the constant presence of a particular object, even if referred to in different ways (by a noun, a pronoun, a phrase), indicates the relative importance of the concept for the given sequence (Van Dijk, 1974). For instance, telling the story of Alex Ferguson, a commentator may refer to him in the following manner: “he”, “MU's unalterable coach”, “sir Alex Ferguson”, “Fergie” etc.

Finally, on the discourse level, `global' relevance, as termed by Van Dijk (1974), should be addressed from the perspective of macro-structures, e.g. the topic of discourse. Accordingly, since the topic of a football commentary is basically a certain game between particular teams, then general information related to this game can be assigned global relevance.

Blakemore (2001, p. 105) adds that relevance “is defined in terms of contextual effect and processing effort”. Basically, a contextual effect demonstrates how new information may interact with hearer's existing knowledge and contextual assumptions on the topic, resulting in better discourse comprehension (ibid). The processing effort can be defined as a function of derivation of contextual effects via understanding the complex structure of an utterance (ibid).

Unlike coherence, cohesion is what makes a text syntactically meaningful. It can be defined as a set of linguistic tools applied to establish relations in discourse according to its grammatical structure (Halliday, 1994). The fundamental cohesive devices include references, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctions and lexical cohesion (Baker & Ellece, 2011). Onwards, I am going to specify each of them.

As cohesive techniques, references are presented by two types: endophora and exophora (Baker & Ellece, 2011). Endophora implies referencing an object within the text and, in its turn, can be divided into anaphora and cataphora (ibid). Anaphora suggests that a word like a pronoun or a determiner references another already mentioned, for example, the name of the coach can be replaced by `he'. As far as cataphora is concerned, the process is reverse: a speaker/writer initially uses a pronoun or a determiner, and only after we can observe the object being referenced: “He tries hard but mishits it again, Sйbastien Haller.”

In contrast, exophora is the process of referencing an extra-linguistic phenomenon existing outside the given communicative situation, which demands some shared knowledge between the producer and the recipient of discourse (ibid). In most instances, exophora is signaled by demonstrative pronouns like `that' or `those': “Iniesta was to have problems one way or another that season” (Barcelona vs. PSG, 2017). Additionally, in sports discourse commentators tend to link their utterances to the image displayed on the screen: “This is Jenkinson, he is going to Sweden next month” (West Ham United vs. Arsenal FC, 2012-2013) As I see it, implicature is a semantic reference to the outer context, expressed by exophora in terms of syntax.

Substitution is a cohesive device used to replace a word or phrase already used in the text by some other word (Baker & Ellece, 2011). For instance, a commentator may replace the name of the player with their jersey number.

Ellipsis is an act of intentional omission of information from a text: “The ball's for Messi - just on the 38th goal so far this season.” (Baker & Ellece, 2011). In this case, the linking part “who is”, introducing the subordinate clause, is omitted. In terms of sports discourse, football commentary in particular, the usage of ellipsis is often predetermined by the limit of time given to report on an event in action.

Conjunctions connect adjacent parts of discourse, for example, clauses or sentences. Halliday & Hasan (1976) note that conjunctions are cohesive components that presuppose the existence of other elements in discourse. Apart from the commonly used conjunctions like `and' or `but', one can utilize conjunctive adverbs, for example, `however' or `nonetheless', to connect their ideas to the previous part of discourse.

Cohesion of the text may also be achieved by lexical cohesion, i.e. repetition of the same word or phrase or the usage of another member of the same semantic group (Baker & Ellece, 2011). In particular cases, repetition produces a stylistic effect, exhibited by such stylistic devices as anadiplosis or chain repetition. Whereas anadiplosis implies a coincidence of the ending and starting parts of consecutive sentences, chain repetition is a flow of several stretches of anadiplosis, for instance, “Ronaldo won the cup, the cup which contributed to his career, the career of a shining star.”

All the above-mentioned devices serve to improve discourse comprehension and fulfil the communicative function of discourse. Besides, these techniques help to maintain the thematical and grammatical unity of the text in the case of insertion of extra elements, such as gap-fillers.

What is more, based on my previous experience of watching matches, I hypothesize that the distribution of gap-fillers between the first and the second halves is uneven. From my point of view, commentators are inclined to use a greater number of gap-fillers in the first half to introduce the viewers to the scene of the game and fill in the gaps emerging until players quicken the pace. In the second half, by contrast, sportscasters allow for more silent stretches as the game usually grows tenser. The empirical part of my research is supposed to test this hypothesis; and apart from that, to identify the most common types of gap-fillers and classify them according to their discursive characteristics and functions in football commentary.

Additionally, since it is commentators who decide upon the way to influence the audience and, therefore, determine the type and function of a particular gap-filler, the next chapter discusses personal characteristics which may affect their choice.

Language personality of a football commentator

Modern linguistics is associated with an in-depth research on the role of the human factor in speech activity (Kyshtymova, 2014). Such anthropocentrism arises from the recognition of the human leading role in generating and using speech patterns. As far as sportscasting is concerned, it is primarily commentators who determine the structure and content of sports discourse.

This research addresses football commentaries presented by sportscasters belonging to different cultures and speaking different languages. Apart from that, personal traits of a commentator have a vital role in the production of football discourse. Utilization of evaluative constructions, usage of different emotive patterns, explicitness of expression, to name just a few, very much depend on commentators' individual characteristics.

The outlined factors led to the introduction of the concept of language personality, the object of an immense body of research: linguistic, psychological, cultural and philosophical (Kyshtymova, 2014). In linguistics the notion was firstly introduced by Vinogradov although the very idea of individual language use originated in XVIII-XIX centuries in the works by Humboldt and was further developed by Weisgerber, Baudouin de Courtenay, Vossler et al. (ibid).

Bogin (1986), who also investigated language personality, created a model where a person is viewed from the point of their readiness to perform and comprehend speech actions. Basically, the model places special emphasis on the speech activity of a language personality (ibid). Afterwards, this approach was critically analyzed by other researchers, Prokhorov (2006) in particular, who noted that despite addressing individual language features, the model does not take into account the very structure of communication in a certain cultural-linguistic community. According to Prokhorov (ibid), a language personality functions in the communicative space. He defines communicative space as a set of communication spheres where a particular language personality can meet their essential needs.

Indeed, sportscasters' communicative space predetermines the functions they perform, or the pragmatic aspect of their language personality as it is termed in the model proposed by Karaulov (1987). The researcher singles out three layers of language personality: verbal-semantic, linguistic-cognitive and pragmatic (ibid). Whereas the first two aspects are related to the language features of a sports commentator, the third one reveals announcer's objectives and ways to influence the viewer.

Besides, different parts of a person's communicative space imply divergent ways of linguistic expression. In fact, based on such observation, scholars introduced the notion of speech personality (Karasik, 1994; Maslova, 2001; Prokhorov, 2006). In Maslova's opinion (2001), a language personality represents a multilayer and complex paradigm of speech personalities. Alongside this, a speech personality is naturally a language personality in the context of real communication, i.e. in a certain communicative space.

...