Article published in:
Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
Edited by Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 256] 2015
► pp. 67–95

Participant roles and embedded interactions in online sports broadcasts

Many communicative events in the media are structurally rather complex, containing several levels on which utterances are produced, mediated and received. The present chapter applies and develops Goffman’s notion of embedded interactions and their participant arrangements by identifying several distinct interactional frames found in modern media genres. Using data from online sports commentaries, the article documents how the individual frames of interaction are represented and linguistically reflected in the written text of the commentary and how the existence of such frames affects the participation framework of the entire communicative act. The analysis distinguishes between horizontal interactions, occurring on the level of the interactants within a specific frame, and vertical interactions, which cut across the boundaries of the communicative frames and which may be addressed to fictitious and non-present as well as real recipients. Since the modern media reach out to the audience by providing for their active involvement, the participant role of the audience as recipients is changing to the extent that they can become co-producers of parts of the media text. Thus, while participants are shown to have multiple roles, the distinction between the production and the reception sides of communication becomes blurred in those genres that encourage or provide for active audience participation.
Published online: 12 February 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.256.04cho
References

References

Ayass, Ruth
2012 “Communicative Activities during the Television Reception: General and Genre Specific Structures of Recipients’ Talk.” In The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life, ed. by Ruth Ayass and Cornelia Gerhardt, 21–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika, and Helen Caple
2012 News Discourse. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2010 The Language of Fictional Television. Drama and Identity. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Bell, Allan
1984 “Language Style as Audience Design.” Language in Society 13: 145–204. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1991 The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin
1996 Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bubel, Claudia
2008 “Film Audiences as Overhearers.” Journal of Pragmatics 40: 55–71. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chovanec, Jan
2006 “Competitive Verbal Interaction in Online Minute-by-minute Match Reports.” Brno Studies in English 32: 23–35.Google Scholar
2008 “Enacting an Imaginary Community: Infotainment in On-line Minute-by-minute Sports Commentaries.” In The Linguistics of Football, ed. by Eva Lavric, Gerhard Pisek, Andrew Skinner, and Wolfgang Stadler, 255–268. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
2009a “ ‘Call Doc Singh!’: Textual Structure and Making Sense of Live Text Sports Commentaries.” In Cohesion and Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse, ed. by Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova and Renata Povolná, 124–137. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
2009b “Simulation of Spoken Interaction in Written Online Media Texts.” Brno Studies in English 35 (2): 109–128. http://​digilib​.phil​.muni​.cz​/handle​/11222​.digilib​/105142
Google Scholar
2010 “Online Discussions and Interaction: The Case of Live Text Commentary.” In Cases on Online Discussion and Interaction. Experiences and Outcomes, ed. by Leonard Shedletsky and Joan E. Aitken, 234–251. Hershey and New York: IGI Global. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 “Humour in Quasi-conversations: Constructing Fun in Online Sports Journalism”. In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 243–264. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 “Conversational Humour and Joint Fantasizing in Online Journalism.” In Language and Humour in the Media, ed. by Jan Chovanec and Isabel Ermida, 139–161. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Forthcoming. “ ‘Nice try, loser’: Participant Structures and Embedded Frames of Interaction in Media Broadcasts.”
Clayman, Stephen E., and John Heritage
2002 The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures On the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven E.
1992 “Footing in the Achievement of Neutrality: The Case of News Interview Discourse.” In Talk at Work, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 163–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Clayman, Steven E.
2010 “Address Terms in the Service of Other Actions: The Case of News Interview Talk.” Discourse & Communication 4: 161–182. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dynel, Marta
2011a “Stranger than Fiction. A Few Methodological Notes on Linguistic Research in Film Discourse.” Brno Studies in English 37 (1): 41–61. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011b “ ‘You Talking to Me?’ The Viewer as a Ratified Listener to Film Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1628–1644. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Charles A.
1983 “Sports Announcer Talk. Syntactic Aspects of Register Variation.” Language in Society 12: 153–172. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita
2006 “ ‘Minister, We will see How the Public Judges You.’ Media references in political interviews.” Journal of Pragmatics 38: 180–195. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gerhardt, Cornelia
2008a “Turn-by-turn and Move-by-move: A Multi-modal Analysis of Live TV Football Commentary.” In The Linguistics of Football, ed. by Eva Lavric, Gerhard Pisek, Andrew Skinner, and Wolfgang Stadler, 283–294. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
2008b Talk by Television Viewers Watching Live Football Matches: Coherence Through Interactionality, Intertextuality, and Multimodality. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Saarbrücken: University of Saarland.
Goffman, Erving
1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles
2007 “Interactive Footing.” In Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction, ed. by Elizabeth Holt and Rebecca Clift, 16–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Greatbatch, David
1998 “Conversation Analysis: Neutralism in British News Interviews.” In Approaches to Media Discourse, ed. by Allan Bell and Peter Garrett, 163–185. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Haugh, Michael
2013 “Im/politeness, Social Practice and the Participation Order.” Journal of Pragmatics 58: 52–72. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman
2010 Talk in Action. Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Malden MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T.
1996 “Shadow Conversations: The Indeterminacy of Participant Roles.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 131–159. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H.
2006. “Live Text Commentaries. Read about it While it Happens”. In Neuere Entwicklungen in der linguistischen Internetforschung, ed. by Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, Jens Runkehl, Peter Schlobinski, and Torsten Siever, 113–131. Hildesheim: Georg Olms.Google Scholar
2010 “Audacious, Brilliant!! What a Strike! Live Text Commentaries on the Internet as Real-time Narratives.” In Narrative Revisited. Telling a Story in the Age of New Media, ed. by Christian R. Hoffmann, 57–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lauerbach, Gerda
2006 “Discourse Representation in Political Interviews: the Construction of Identities and Relations through Voicing and Ventriloquizing.” Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2): 196–215. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lavric, Eva, Gerhard Pisek, Wolfgang Stadler, Andrew Skinner, and Erika Giorgianni
2008 “ ‘Zidane, Zidane, What have You Done?’ Emotions on TV in Six Languages”. In The Linguistics of Football, ed. by Eva Lavric, Gerhard Pisek, Andrew Skinner, and Wolfgang Stadler, 359–373. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
1988 “Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman’s Participation Framework.” In Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. by Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton, 161–227. Oxford: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Lombardo, Linda
2009 “The News Presenter as Socio-cultural Construct.” In Evaluation and Stance in War News. A Linguistic Analysis of American, British and Italian Television News Reporting of the 2003 Iraqi War, ed. by Louann Haarman and Linda Lombardo, 48–71. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria
2009 Television Discourse. Analysing Language in the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Maynard, Senko K.
1997 “Textual Ventriloquism: Quotation and the Assumed Community Voice in Japanese Newspaper Columns.” Poetics 24: 379–392. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meinhof, Ulrike H.
1994 “Double Talk in News Broadcasts: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Pictures and Texts in Television News.” In Media Texts: Authors and Readers, ed. by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett, 212–223. Clevedon: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Martin
2007 The Discourse of Broadcast News. A Linguistic Approach. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Müller, Torsten
2007 Football, Language and Linguistics. Time-critical Utterances in Unplanned Spoken Language, Their Structures and Their Relation to Non-linguistic Situations and Events. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
O’Keeffe, Anne
2006 Investigating Media Discourse. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Paolillo, John C., and Asta Zelenkauskaite
2013 “Real-time Chat”. In Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, ed. by Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen, 109–133. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Pérez-Sabater, Carmen, Gemma Peña-Martínez, Ed Turney, and Begoña Montero-Fleta
2008 “A Spoken Genre gets Written: Online Football Commentaries in English, French, and Spanish.” Written Communication 25 (2): 235–261. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sidnell, Jack
2009 “Participation.” The Pragmatics of Interaction, ed. by Sigurd D’hondt, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren, 125–156. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Steensen, Steen
2011 “Cozy Journalism. The Rise of Social Cohesion as an Ideal in Online, Participatory Journalism.” Journalism Practice 5 (6): 687–703. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Talbot, Mary
2007 Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, John
1995 The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Thornborrow, Joanna
2000 “The Construction of Conflicting Accounts in Public Participation TV.” Language in Society 29: 357–377. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tolson, Adrew
2006 Media Talk. Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Wood, Helen
2007 “The Mediated Conversational Floor: An Interactive Approach to Audience Reception Analysis.” Media, Culture and Society 29 (1): 75–103. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

No author info given
2018.  In The Discourse of Online Sportscasting [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 297], Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 november 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.