Professionally oriented publicist discourse and its reflection in English mass media

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«Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic» National University

Professionally oriented publicist discourse and its reflection in english mass media

Pidhorna A.В.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study ofprofessionally oriented discourse, in particular, English football mass media discourse and its linguistic representation in mass media texts. Football is currently one of the most popular sports in the world and the upcoming World Cup in Qatar makes its thorough research even more topical. The article focuses on key linguistic peculiarities of football mass media texts, which helps define what makes these texts work for their readers who include various groups - from professionals to ardent fans or just those who get interested in this kind of sport from Championship to Championship. These linguistic features include, first of all, terms and professional or publicist cliches, which associate these texts with professionally oriented ones. However, there is also clearly defined emotional colouring realized through vocabulary and syntactic means, which can help us associate the texts under study with standard mass media targeted at a wider audience. All in all, this combination of seemingly opposite characteristics makes football mass media unique and worth researching. The article offers numerous examples which illustrate how all features mentionedfunction and what pragmatic effect they produce. Certain emphasis is made on key differences between various genres of English football publicist discourse, such as the analytical article, internet-articles in popular periodical football publications, posts and articles at official sites of teams and players, texts to video commentaries to football matches, and others. This kind ofanalysis makes it possible for researchers to conclude which characteristics are most efficient and most potent in achieving the informative and pragmatic effects needed, with consideration of the genre and target audience.

Key words: mass media discourse, terms, cliches, emotional colouring, syntactic constructions, informative, pragmatic effect.

Анотація

Підгорна А. Б. ПРОФЕСІЙНО ОРІЄНТОВАНИЙ ПУБЛІЦИСТИЧНИЙ ДИСКУРС ТА ЙОГО РЕФЛЕКСІЯ В АНГЛОМОВНИХ МАС-МЕДІА

Стаття присвячена дослідженню професійно орієнтованого дискурсу, зокрема англомовного футбольного мас-медійного дискурсу та його мовній репрезентації в текстах мас-медіа. Футбол наразі є одним із найпопулярніших видів спорту в світі, а прийдешній Чемпіонат світу в Катарі робить вивчення цього дискурсу ще більш актуальним. Стаття зосереджується на основних мовних особливостях англомовних футбольних мас-медійних текстів, що дозволяє визначити, що робить ці тексти інформативними та цікавими для своїх читачів, які репрезентують різні групи - починаючи від професіоналів і до завзятих фанатів або просто тих, хто цікавиться цим видом спорту лише від чемпіонату до чемпіонату. Ці мовні особливості включають, перш за все, терміни та професійні чи публіцистичні кліше, які асоціюють аналізовані тексти з професійно орієнтованими. Однак, також присутнє в них і очевидне емоційне забарвлення, яке реалізується через різноманітні лексичні та синтаксичні засоби, що уможливлює віднесеність цих текстів до стандартних мас-медійних продуктів, які спрямовані на більш широку аудиторію. В цілому, саме ця комбінація, як здається, протилежних властивостей робить футбольний мас-медійний дискурс унікальним і вартим особливої уваги дослідників. Ця стаття надає багато прикладів з англомовних мас-медіа, що ілюструють, як всі ознаки, згадані вище, функціонують і який прагматичний ефект вони уможливлюють. Певний акцент також робиться на відмінностях між різними жанрами англомовної футбольної публіцистики - аналітична стаття, стаття у популярному періодичному футбольному виданні, публікації на офіційних сайтах команд чи гравців, коментарі до відеотрансляцій тощо. Такий аналіз допомагає дослідникам зробити висновок щодо властивостей, які є найбільш ефективних у досягненні інформативності та належного прагматичного ефекту.

Ключові слова: мас-медійний дискурс, терміни, кліше, емоційне забарвлення, синтаксичні конструкції, інформативність, прагматичний ефект.

Problem Statement. Researching cognitive, linguistic, social, and national aspects of discourse is currently one of the themes which are actively being studied to reveal the peculiarities of communication in different situations of interpersonal interaction. Researchers underline that «without discourse, there is no social reality, and without understanding discourse, we cannot understand our reality, our experiences, or ourselves» [2, p. 2]. People speak to each other via discourses and these corpora of different discourses are inhomogeneous in terms of modus, genre, functional style, and formality criterion [1, p. 27]. This is what makes discourse study, in particular professional discourses, not only topical but essential.

The concept «discourse» is very polysemantic. In different works, it is used along with such terms as «speaking» (immersed in life), «text», «functional style», and others. However, there is no unambiguous definition of the concept «discourse» yet. It is probably what has made this term so popular in recent decades: connected by complicated relationships, its different interpretations successfully satisfy various conceptual needs modifying more traditional understanding of language, text, dialogue, style, etc. [7, p. 26-27].

The term «discourse» was first used by the American linguist Z. Harris in 1952. The scientist defined this term as «a method for the analysis of connected speech (or writing) that goes beyond the limits of a single sentence and correlates culture and lan- guage» [12, p. 1508]. The researcher's goal was to take descriptive linguistics beyond the study of a single sentence. In the 1970s, the French linguist E. Benveniste introduced the anthropocentric paradigm of language study and regarded the discourse as the language functioning in real life communication. He was one of the first who gave the discourse its terminological definition describing it as «the language appropriated by the one who speaks» [2, p. 137].

Presently, the discourse approach to the study of texts is one of the most important formulas of modern linguistics. It means that each text is viewed in terms of the situation in which it was created, in its interrelations with other texts in consideration of targets, opinions, and the author's personal characteristics. It is necessary to take into consideration the role this text can perform in the system of texts and, more generally, in society as a whole.

Research Background. Although discourse is realized through texts, it would be incorrect to make its understanding as narrow as in terms of texts only. Researchers N. Phillips and C. Hardy pertinently assert that «discourses are embodied in texts, but exist beyond the individual texts that compose them» [26, p. 3]. Sport and particularly football discourse, which is under study in this paper, is mainly associated with actions rather than with texts. Thus, in our case it could be more relevant to define the key term «discourse» according to B. Zilbert and A. Zil- bert: “Discourse is everything that is said or written about any phenomenon of the reality” [5, p. 46]. Such understanding of the discourse allows us to analyze its various manifestations, including sport reports or Internet genres.

Another moment worth paying attention to when studying discourse is the language because it is the language that makes discourse alive. However, it cannot be said that discourse is realized through language only. It is “a form of language-and-speech interaction” [2, p. 42], that is language in action or, as mentioned above, language immersed in life. Y. Stepanov specifies that discourse is mostly texts, “behind which there is certain grammar, certain vocabulary, certain rules of using words and syntax, certain semantics, and, finally, a certain world” [8, p. 36]. So, this “world” of a certain discourse is created through language arranged according to the communication objective.

Sport is presently a very widespread cultural phenomenon that has a huge social significance and successfully competes with other types of activities in their fight for customers. Moreover, sport is an undeniably profitable source of income for mass media which use it for their commercial benefits and, at the same time, popularize it even more. In addition, sport performs an essential social function by gathering people of various social groups together around a certain nationwide idea. Therefore, the main goal of any sport activity as a cultural and social phenomenon is information exchange among big groups of people.

Sport issues have been covered by specialists in different scientific fields - culture studies, sociology, psychology, linguistics. As for the linguistic aspect of the studies, the specifics of the modern sport discourse, its genre varieties, and main language characteristics have been revealed in the works by I. Dubchak [4], O. Filimonova [10], S. Sharafutdinova [11], and others. However, the problem of genre differentiation in the sport discourse is still topical since the growing attention to sport in general and the development of Internet communication, in particular, are leading to new and new amendments. There are also other issues that require some coverage from the perspective of discourse analysis. They are linguistic features of sport texts, language means that serve as verbal tools of persuasion in sport communication. All this justifies the topicality of our research.

Objective Statement. The study of discourse, which is widely viewed as a communicative act realized both in speaking and writing, gives an opportunity to research linguistic peculiarities of a certain sphere of communication. Discourse can be classified into different types based on various criteria, i.e. theme, purpose, style, professionalism level, etc. There are also written, oral, and mental discourses. By these criteria, in this paper, we study football (theme, which is professionally oriented) publicist (style) discourse using the material of different publicist genres (the analytical article, the popular article in an electronic periodic magazine, publications at official websites of certain teams / sportsmen, professional commentaries to video broadcasting). In the first three genres of the abovementioned, we talk about the written realization of discourse and in the latter - about the oral one. However, all genres aim at a wide audience - both of professionals and fans, or of merely those who are at least a little interested in football and/or events which are important for the world sport in general. Despite this focus on the wider audience, which is successfully put into practice through the use of the publicist style along with its linguistic features, the products of the football discourse can be undoubtedly referred to professionally oriented ones and the linguistic peculiarities of such texts are also quite evident in genres analyzed.

The topics covered in football discourse are quite diverse. Mainly, they are reviews of matches and their results, descriptions, and commentaries concerning teams, information about perspectives teams have, and others. But football discourse may also include articles telling about certain players, coaches, and teams. These texts can reveal secrets not only about professional life but also private details because they can be interesting to fans as well. We can also mention the topic of football fans and their behavior before, during, and after matches. Very often these texts are of negative character since they tell their readers about fans' rather violent reaction to their favourite team's failure or even about vandalism as a result of fans' discontent.

As it is obvious from the arguments given above, the language content of the texts under consideration depends on the fact that these texts include characteristics typical both of professionally oriented texts and publicist ones. Therefore, the detailed analysis of football texts in English publicist discourse has shown that the most distinctive features of the texts are (1) terms and cliches, which are often found in professionally oriented texts, and (2) emotionally coloured vocabulary and grammatical constructions, which are frequent in publicist style.

Analysis. To start illustrating the abovegiven arguments, it is worth underlying that the use of terms and their structural variability are obvious. Perhaps, this is the most evident lexical feature of the football discourse. Thus, there can be easily found football terms of all structural types: 1) one-component terms: card, corner, defeat, equalizer, foul, offside, partisan, pass, penalty, period, pitch, post, referee, space, steward, strike, substitute, supporter, team; 2) compounds: ballboy, crossbar, free-kick, goalkeeper, handball, left-back, linesman, scoreline, sideline, silverware, spot-kick, wall-pass; 3) word-combinations: advantage rule, aggregate score, partisan crowd, transfer fee.

The structural types of football terms in the football publicist discourse also include different shortenings and abbreviations, which are typical of professionally oriented texts. So, there are shortenings of standard key terms, such as ref instead of referee, stats instead of statistics, or name shortenings of famous football clubs - Barca instead of Barcelona. There are also abbreviations: aet (the abbreviated wordcombination after extra time), PSG (the shortened name of the football club Paris Saint-Germain), FA (Football Association), FC (Football Club), UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), and FIFA (Federation of International Football Associations). In addition to shortenings and abbreviations, the context ellipsis can also be observed: United instead of Manchester United or City instead of Manchester City. The term «context ellipsis» was coined by D. Lotte [6, p. 16] to describe situations when some elements which usually function as part of terminological word-combinations are omitted, for the sake of conciseness, but they can be easily reproduced owing to the context:

United were leading 1-0 when he came on, only for Everton to score an equaliser [13]. football mass media discourse

City had camera fixed on dugout during 2-2 draw at Anfield [20].

By the way, these two clubs are so popular in England that simultaneously with the context ellipsis there are their other shortenings: Man City instead ofManchester City and Man Utd instead ofManchester United [22].

It must be underlined that terms in football publicist discourse are represented by different parts of speech. Mainly, there are nouns; however, there are also verbs, since football is all about action: to beat, to clear, to concede, to curl, to fire, to head, to integrate, to kick, to knock out, to pass, to qualify, to shoot, to score, to tackle. Noun terms derived from phrasal verbs form a separate group: dugout, followup, kick-off, setup, throw-in. They additionally contribute to the energy of action to the football discourse even via nouns. There are adjectives as well, e.g: fit, harsh, though it is worth mentioning that they are not as frequent in the discourse analyzed. They are more common as evaluating elements used for emotional colouring.

At the same time, we need to emphasize the presence of adnouns derived from word combinations where they function as attributes. For example, the adjective international comes from the wordcombinations international competition and international player via nominalization into the adjective:

Kane has scored his 36 goals in competitive internationals at a rate of one every 118 minutes [21].

Providing cover for the injured Benjamin Mendy and Fabian Delph, the Ukrainian international grew into his new role and turned in a number of eye-catching displays [27].

There is one more interesting example of such a conversion, i.e. the noun friendly in the meaning «a friendly match»: The quartet now have five days to get up and running ahead of the new campaign, though, having missed all of City's pre-season friendlies [16].

Furthermore, owing to the ellipsis and conversion we can observe one form of the term function as different parts of speech, for instance, both noun and adjective: Of the major leagues, however, the English Premier League is the most expat of all [18].

A separate lexical group is represented by proper names. In addition to the names of coaches and players, places, and stadiums, there are also names that can be considered terms of the football discourse: the Premier League, the World Cup, the Community Shield, Ballon d'Or, and others. They may mean nothing to people who are not interested in football, but for everyone who is fond of football, especially English football fans, know that the Community Shield is an English football's annual match contested at Wembley Stadium between the winners of the previous season's Premier League. The word-combination Ballon d'Or, despite its French etymology, is directly associated with the award which honours the male player deemed to have performed the best over the previous year. Even in the British media, the name of this award is given without any additional explanation: Ronaldo, a five-times Ballon d'Or winner, has scored five goals in six appearances since his return to the club he first played for from 2003 to 2009 [13].

One more phenomenon which characterizes the football publicist discourse is the use of the possessive case both with proper names and with nouns that define a person/club or time/period when the event takes place: the club's relegation, the season's fixtures, the Three Lions ' defeat. In addition to the said above about the importance of using proper names which can be sometimes understood only by professionals or football fans, we want to draw attention to the wordcombination the Three Lions that the British press often uses to talk about England's national team. The image of lions is present on England's national emblem and the use of the image to name the team undoubtedly conveys positive evaluation along with the association of the team with a lion - the king of all animals.

It is also a well-known fact that both publicist and professionally oriented discourses have a certain set of set expressions - cliches - that are used to optimize communication. They facilitate the perception of information and promote clarity as, due to the frequency of their use, the recipient immediately comprehends them while the author can introduce them with the purpose of organizing ideas and strengthening the logos of the text. Since the object of our analysis is the football publicist discourse, the set of cliches observed there can be divided into those that are common for publicist texts and those that are more typical of the football sphere.

The first group includes: 1) verbs that introduce direct speech (he said..., he added...., she wrote...., he told the BBC..., he argues); 2) impersonal constructions used for the similar purpose of sharing opinions (it is understood., there is a firm belief., it remains to be seen... ); 3) a group of cliches which give information based on some research or statistical analysis (as this recent report confirms., our research explains why ., research also suggests that.); 4) numerous linkers which provide logical connection (thus, however, on the contrary, in other words, to begin with, nevertheless and many others); 5) a number of adverbs also used for logical connection and opinion introduction (arguably, on the negative side, even more noticeably); and 6) some more formal and complicated constructions which are inherent in scientific or professionally oriented writing (this is not to mention., given that., club rivalries aside, he might do..).

The second group of cliches identified in the football publicist discourse is represented by fixed phraseological expressions characterized by their idiomatic nature, figurativeness, and frequency of use in the football publicist discourse analyzed. Those may include units that denote certain sport fixtures, for instance: to make it to the final, only to fall at the final hurdle, to seal triumph, to fall short in their run for World Cup, to hit the big time, to hit the ground running, etc.

It is also well-known that the publicist style typically has higher emotional colouring. It is explained by the fact that texts ofthis style are intended for a wider audience, for people of different social groups and interests as well as aimed at influencing these recipients. The neutral or formal narration with the help of terms and cliches only cannot help achieve the necessary pragmatic effect. Thus, as far as football is concerned, its fans can get interested in anything that appeals to emotions - both negative and positive. So, it is predictable that the analysis of football publicist texts reveals the active use of emotionally coloured vocabulary - from emotionally coloured adjectives to football slang and metaphors:

Barcelona claimed a scarcely believable Champions League victory against Paris Saint- Germain [24].

As it can be seen in the following examples, the authors use evaluative adjectives in the superlative degree to strengthen the effect of emotional tension:

“Jon's not the quickest but he's got a real knowledge of the game and a really great will, ” O'Neill said. “He is totally invaluable to us” [17].

..the hosts scored three times from the 88th minute onwards at Camp Nou to complete the biggest turnaround ever seen in the competition [24].

Comparing that to Reading's most recent, perhaps most poignant, heartbreak takes a bit of a stretch, but the parallels are there [14].

The other examples of football discourse emotiveness can be represented by professional jargonisms: gunner meaning “a special player in the team who is supposed to keep closer to the touchline and to run along the pitch after a kick or loss of the ball pursuing the rival as fast as possible” [9, p. 393]; gaffer meaning “manager” or giant-killer used to denote an unknown team that has got a more famous one defeated [19]. The terminological word-combination feeder club can also be named a jargonism. It defines a club from which other clubs can take good players who are already prepared to play skillfully:

There are also advantages over England's system of loaning out players to lesser clubs or ofusing feeder clubs in the way that Liverpool takes players from Genk of Belgium [18].

Another group of emotionally coloured vocabulary can be illustrated by various idioms actively used in the publicist texts in general and, in particular, football: at a canter, cover oneself in glory, from nothing, get into the game, hold your hand up тощо [19]:

Raheem Sterling scared the Croatia defence almost to a standstill with a series of runs at the heart of them [23].

But a great finish from Cavani just after the hour mark [...] seemed to have made the difference, before the late heroics from Neymar and Roberto [24].

Yet these moves do not always work out, with players sometimes failing to live up to their potential [25].

The last sentence given above is a curious example that combines all typical lexical features of English football publicist texts - terms of different structural types (finish, hour mark), emotionally coloured adjectives (great), and nouns (heroics), as well as idioms (make the difference).

One more lexical group with additional connotation, often found in the football publicist discourse, includes metaphors. First of all, they are those that function as terms, e.g.: scissor kick, dead ball, dugout [20].

Non-terminological metaphors are also common. They evaluate, add to emotiveness, and help the author achieve the pragmatic effect intended:

Roy Keane had called for a war but what he got was bloody awful until, that is, Jon Walters stormed to Ireland's rescue five minutes from time [17].

The crowd went wild [17].

Luis Enrique's side were three goals up within 50 minutes and did not allow Cavani's intervention to foil their bid for a slice of history [24].

Syntax, graphical means, and punctuation are other powerful tools of emotional colouring and extra emphasis in the football publicist discourse. These are repetitions of different types, emphatic constructions, split constructions, detachments, rhetorical questions, absolute participial constructions, etc., which relevantly contribute to the set of lexical means of emotional colouring described above. All this together makes the products of football discourse more accessible and interesting for the audience, for example:

It's the hope that kills you [14].

Significant as it is, single viewpoint optical tracking would only take you so far [29].

But in our modern world of near-constant sports broadcasting, does the blackout still make sense? I think not [15].

Shaw did operate a well-known data science- oriented football blog [29].

Conclusions. The analysis of the abovementioned features in different genres of football publicist discourse has proved the presence of them all but in different frequencies of use. Thus, analytical articles are characterized by greater «seriousness» and formality. Popular articles, in their turns, differ in more active emotional colouring (though emotional colouring can be observed in analytical articles, too). Popular articles target at a wider audience and therefore they have simple sentences and more stylistic devices. Publications at official football websites are very similar to popular articles because the target audience is the same.

However, there are more differences found in commentaries to video broadcasts. This is an oral genre; that is why intonation is very important. Intonation contributes to emotional colouring and, therefore, the need in other elements is not so great. One more peculiarity observed is an active use of proper names because the commentator must name those teams or players who are in hold of the ball or explain exactly what is going on on the pitch.

So, we can generalize by saying that all genres of football publicist discourse have a set of typical peculiarities that can be more often or less found in each of them. These peculiarities undoubtedly confirm that these genres belong to the publicist style (emotionally coloured and evaluative vocabulary, numerous figurative devices, emphatic constructions, etc.), but their professional orientation also requires a number of qualities that are typical of specialized texts and scientific style in general (terms and cliches).

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