ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the results of a fine-grained grammatical analysis of live commentaries of football (soccer) games and so adds to a growing body of literature concerned with the linguistics of sport and, therein, particularly with football (Bowcher 2001; Gavins and Simpson 2015; Kuiper 1996; Lavric et al. 2008; Mackenzie 2005; Marriott 1996; Reaser 2003; Wyatt and Hadikin 2015). More specifically, two subtly different types of football commentary are compared via a linguistic analysis: UK-produced live radio and television commentaries. The linguistic inquiry here explores how the experiences reported in these commentaries are encoded grammatically in the language used. As such, a detailed and large-scale analysis of the commentary data is conducted using Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL), specifically a transitivity analysis (Halliday 1994; Martin et al. 1997). In Systemic Functional theory where language is seen as inherently related to social context and culture (Halliday 1977, 1978, 1985), such an analysis can tell us a lot about the data contextually. Section 3.2 outlines the transitivity system within Halliday’s SFL. Section 3.3 introduces the data analysed, explaining the contextual attributes and offering some preliminary linguistic characteristics of the component parts of the data set. Section 3.4, the body of the chapter, presents the results of the analysis of transitivity undertaken on the commentary data. This section is divided into three parts to reflect three pertinent trends consequent from the data analysis. The paper is brought to a close with the summary conclusion in Section 3.5.
The analytical framework of transitivity as proposed in SFL (Davidse 1999; Halliday 1967-8, 1994; Martin et al. 1997, ch. 4; Matthiessen 1995, ch. 4) is a semanticised approach to transitivity. As such, it principally differs
