The evolution of football live text commentaries: A corpus linguistic case study on genre change

Simon Meier-Vieracker
TU Dresden
Abstract

Since the emergence of online live text commentaries on football games in the late 1990s, the genre has undergone continuous change. While linguistic research on the genre of live text commentaries emphasizes its novelty, the genre has existed in football for at least 20 years. However, diachronic studies still lack. This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of genre and register-specific features of German live text commentaries from 2003 until 2020. Using quantitative methods, it focuses on the distribution of linguistic features on different linguistic (i.e. syntactical, lexical, graphemic etc.) levels over time. It is shown that various markers, which signal a colloquial register and emulate orality in the written mode, decrease, leading to a more impersonal way of reporting. Moreover, markers of individual perspective decrease in favor of a neutralistic stance. Thus, the evolution of live text commentaries can be described as a process of standardization.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 1 April 2021

Date accepted: 1 October 2021

Published online: 31 January 2022

Table of contents

Since the genre of online live text commentaries has emerged in the late 1990s, and since it has attracted the attention of linguists some years later, its very novelty has been emphasized. In addition to its characterization as a “new text type” (Jucker, 2010, p. 58), a “novel journalistic genre” (Chovanec, 2011, p. 243) or “a new specialized register” (Werner, 2016, p. 271) in the area of electronically-mediated communication, also the particular research questions addressed to this genre often focus on its novelty. Live text commentaries are analyzed as a hybrid genre combining traditional forms of spoken and written sports discourse (Werner, 2016), as transfer of an established communication format to a new medium (Hauser, 2008) or as a manifestation of increasing media convergence in the era of digitalization (Hauser, 2010). Other studies relate the emergence of live text commentaries to a more comprehensive “shift toward orality in written and, more generally, public discourse” (Pérez-Sabater et al., 2008). A diachronic dimension is therefore usually inscribed to the research on live text commentaries. Nevertheless, diachronic studies in the proper sense, i.e. empirical studies on the emergence and the development of this genre, still lack. Existing contrastive research focuses on cross-linguistic (Pérez-Sabater et al., 2008; Meier, 2019a) or cross-generic (Lewandowski, 2012) aspects, but most of these studies work with rather small data sets that only represent one point in time. However, since the genre has now existed for more than 20 years and can be traced back without a gap in the archives of the online providers, it has long been suitable for diachronic research.

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