The Language of television and radio football commentary

For my language investigation I will investigate the language used by football commentators on Television and Radio and how they use lexical, syntactic and technical features to commentate the audience. Rhetorical questions are a big part of the lexis used by commentators such as "How did he miss that?!" and "Is this a chance?" this is a way for commentators connecting with the fans watching game bringing excitement to what they're listening to.

 Metaphors are widely used in commentary, especially radio commentary to add a more vivid image of the match as radio uses cannot see the match for them nor have any visual aids. "Real Madrid forming a wall at the back of their defence" is an example of this because without it, it would be nothing but boring factual information. This is obviously nothing new; newspapers and various other media companies use them every day; however with football commentaries it's a bit different. It's not in writing it's in conversation, but in our everyday conversations there are fillers, hesitations and incorrect grammar use, but commentators are experienced and perhaps practised the spontaneous speech. When commentators are commentating on action, present tense is used to create drama as its happening as we speak, it's called play-by-play commentary.

Radio and television commentary both have linguistic features available by commentators to convey the action on the pitch to the viewers and listeners without them being there.

By Jack Towers