The Discourse of Online Sportscasting

This book offers the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the most innovative online genres of modern news media. The study focuses on written sports commentaries in online newspapers that enable partial real-time audience involvement in the media text. Adopting an approach from interactional pragmatics, the book identifies the genre’s characteristic micro-linguistic features as well as its unique narrative structure. Live text commentary is shown to be a hybrid and multimodal text format – an internally complex form of media communication that combines elements of live spoken broadcasting, blogging, informal conversation and online chat. It aims to inform as well as entertain the audience: by using humour, banter and real or staged dialogue it seeks to create a sense of community among its readers – sports fans. The book will be of interest to many scholars in linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis and social sciences, as well as to all others interested in modern online genres, news media and sports discourse.

Antje Wilton, University of Siegen, in Journal of Pragmatics Vol. 149 (2019), pp. 129-131:
It is clear that the book provides an excellent basis for researchers of emerging media genres in and outside the field of sports communication. Because of its very clear structure and approach as well as its thorough but nevertheless focused treatment of theoretical foundations, this study is particularly suited to be used in teaching, either on sports communication more specifically or on media discourse and media genres more generally. Students planning to do a research project on any of these subjects will find this a very accessible and inspiring source and an excellent guide in methodology.