Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports: Texts, Media, Modalities

Description

Recent decades have seen a fundamental change and transformation in the commercialisation and popularisation of sports and sporting events. Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports uses corpus resources to offer new perspectives on the language and discourse of this increasingly popular and culturally significant area of research. Bringing together a range of empirical studies from leading scholars, this book bridges the gap between quantitative corpus approaches and more qualitative, multimodal discourse methods. Covering a wide range of sports, including football, cycling and basketball, the linguistic aspects of sports language are analysed across different genres and contexts. Highlighting the importance of studying the language of sports alongside its accompanying audio-visual modes of communication, chapters draw on new digitised collections of language to fully describe and understand the complexities of communication through various channels. In doing so, Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports not only offers exciting new insights into the language of sports but also extends the scope of corpus linguistics beyond traditional monomodal approaches to put multimodality firmly on the agenda.

Marcus Callies is Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany. Magnus Levin is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Linnaeus University, Sweden.

The editors of the book, Marcus Callies and Magnus Levin, have assembled a fascinating collection of work addressing an intersection of language and context that is of itself a growing area of interest for linguists. * Human Kinetics * [The book] offers innovative empirical studies that use new corpus resources to showcase the structural-linguistic and discourse aspects of a wide range of sports (e.g. football, cycling, motor racing), genres (e.g. live commentary, post-match reports, legal texts) and contexts of use (e.g. sports media, in-team communication). Considering the pioneering investigations involved in each chapter, the volume is especially impressive in its exploratory nature and rich implications for future research. * LINGUIST * [T]his is an excellent contribution to scholarly research around mental health. * Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies * An innovative, multifaceted collection going beyond current trends: studying English in comparison with other languages, investigating football and various other sports, studying metaphors, phraseology and many other aspects, analysing not only match reports and live text commentaries, but also a series of internet genres just emerging, with new variants of multimodality and language mixing - rich, profound, and inspiring! * Eva Lavric, Professor of Romance Linguistics, Innsbruck University, Austria * This comprehensive volume is among the first to focus on the language of sports, covering a wide range of topics from discussions in race car cockpits to online fan commentaries, which are analysed from equally diverse linguistic perspectives. A highly recommended read for anyone interested in the cultural, social and linguistic aspects of sports. * Tuomo Hiippala, Assistant Professor of English Language and Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki, Finland * This is a most welcome addition to the burgeoning collection of linguistic research on mediated sports discourse. The editors have to be congratulated for preparing a fascinating book that will prove to be indispensable to scholars and students in linguistics, media studies and communication, as well as to anybody else interested in sports, language and communication. * Jan Chovanec, Associate Professor of English Linguistics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic *