English Philology and Translation and Two Western European Languages

Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Educational and Scientific Institute of Philology

Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication

English in Figure Skating Broadcast

Bachelor’s thesis

written by the 4th year student

3rd English group

of Bachelor’s programme

“English Philology and Translation and Two Western European Languages”

Daria Shevchuk

Supervised by

Olena Popivniak, PhD

Reviewed by:

_______________________________

Kyiv 2023

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….1

1. Sports commentary as a phenomenon of linguistics……………………..……...4

1.1. History of sports commentary…………………………………………………4

1.2. The notion of sports commentary and its typology……………………………7

1.3. Genre features of sports commentary……………………………………..….11

1.4. Figure skating commentary in comparison with other sports commentary…..14

Conclusion to CHAPTER 1………………………………………………….……17

2. Figure skating broadcast and its specific features………………………...……19

2.1. Stylistics and syntax of figure skating commentary…………………..……...19

2.2. Figure skating specific lexical features………………………………………30

2.3. Gendered broadcast features manifested in figure skating commentary….….34

Conclusion to CHAPTER 2………………………………………………….……39

CONCLUSION…………………………………....………………………….......41

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………....44

REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………45

APPENDICES…………………………………………………………………….51

INTRODUCTION

The earliest mention of ice-skating dates back to 3000 B.C. Although the sports broadcasting itself started much later in 1911, in Lawrence, Kansas, we are able to conclude that the slang of the aforementioned sport fans most likely have been created around 3000 B.C. Therefore, it is necessary to examine and investigate the matter of the overall development of the voiced and texted sports broadcast throughout the years.

Nowadays, there is a large number of different kinds of websites demonstrating both written, and oral commentary of various sports events. As a matter of fact, we can consider www.eurosport.com  https://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com  www.bbc.co.uk/sport  or even www.youtube.com  as the major sources of video, voice and text reports. Since communication is what matters most to us, athletics adds a unique layer of culture to society. According to T.A. van Dijk's definition, discourse is interpreted as a social reality, a speech flow; a language that is always changing, absorbing the diversity of its historical era as well as the communicants and the unique characteristics of the communicative context. That leads us to the fact that discourse evidently is a mirror image of culture and mentality, both universal and individual [7]. Thus, as a component of culture that conveys broader cultural trends and viewpoints, sports occupy a special role in society and communication. As a result, speech and sports have a significant impact on how different historical eras, communicators, and communicative situations are reflected, underscoring their importance as fundamental elements of culture and communication.

Recently, sports broadcasts have become increasingly popular. The speech of the broadcaster is of interest for linguistic research. Sports commentary consists of an analysis of current events, establishing cause-and-effect relationships between them and predicting their consequences. Studying the features of the speech of a sports commentator allows you to understand how the report is built and by what means the reporter makes his report interesting and attractive to the listener.

The object of the research is the way the English language is used in figure skating broadcast.

The subject of the research are the characteristics of literary, oral, and communicative components of sports competitions, particularly figure skating.

The theoretical basis of the research are the works of Ukrainian and foreign authors on the theory of text and video sport broadcast and the peculiarities of this phenomenon (V. Barchuk, A.V. Husev, O. Kolupaeva, D. Crystal, M. Lewandowski, K. Kuiper) and on the theory of figure skating and other sports discourse and commentary (T. Ed, O.V. Babenko, A.B. Zilbert).

Numerous examples of broadcast material were analyzed during the research. In particular, 6 replays (24 hours of material) of English-language video broadcasts posted on the sites https://olympics.com  and https://www.youtube.com  The collected material for the research dates from 2018 to 2022; for the theoretical part, material concerning figure skating commentary and broadcast was selected based on the criteria of popularity and number of text and video broadcasts on English-language sports websites.

The relevance of the research is connected with the study of the structural and semantic organization of the commentary and with the study of effective forms and methods of coverage of a sporting event. The linguistic and semantic features of the commentary are of interest to many linguists who study various forms of discourse and communication. Furthermore, thanks to the special role of television, billions of people are now involved in sports communication.

The purpose of writing the paper is to analyze the use of various texted and video materials in the English language, the lexical particularities and key definitions pertaining to the topic. To achieve desired result in work, one should solve the following tasks: 1) consider the essence of the texted, video and audio broadcast, their types and functions 2) define and highlight the main areas of research of key concepts of communicative linguistics, namely speech genre and sports discourse 3) analyze the language means in the context of broadcasts of figure skating, their comparison, evaluation of functions in terms of expressing the main content and subtext.