Grammatical Cohesion in Online Minute-By-Minute Football Commentary
Cornelius Fuumaale Suom-Kogle 
& Osei Yaw Akoto
Issue: Vol.5 No.4 Issue Article 8 pp.448-464
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2024548 | Published online 12th April, 2024
© 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Linguistic inquiry into football commentary has become prevalent in recent times. Despite the plethora of studies on football commentary, the cohesive elements within it remain unexplored. The present study, therefore, investigated the grammatical cohesive devices in Online Minute-By-Minute Football Commentary (OMBMFC). Three OMBMFCs from The Guardian news were collected, processed, and analysed. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion Theory, the study found that all four types of grammatical cohesive devices (reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunctions) were employed in the OMBMFC. The most dominant grammatical cohesive devices were references followed by conjunctive devices and the least used were ellipsis and substitution. The study also found that these devices were employed to avoid repetition and to link sentences. It was recommended that an investigation of both grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in OMBMFCs be carried out to ascertain a holistic view of the role cohesion devices play in these commentaries. The study extends research in cohesion studies, particularly in football commentary.
Keywords: Sports Commentary, Cohesion, Cohesive Devices, Online Minute-By-Minute Football Commentary
Ahangar, Abbas Ali, Giti Taki, and Maryam Rahimi. “A Study on Morpho-Syntactic Patterns: A Cohesive Device in Some Persian Live Sport Radio and TV Talks.” Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies 7, no. 2 (2015): 1–24.
———. “The Use of Conjunctions as Cohesive Devices in Iranian Sport Live Radio and TV Talks.” SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 9, no. 2 (2012).
Amoakohene, Benjamin, Richard Senyo Kofi Kwakye, and Osei Yaw Akoto. “Grammatical Cohesion in French Journal Abstracts and Their English Equivalence.” The Journal of Languages for Specific Purposes 9, no. 1 (2022): 37–54.
Anthony, Laurence. “AntConc (Version 3.5. 8)[Computer Software]. Tokyo: Waseda University,” 2019.
Bahaziq, Afnan. “Cohesive Devices in Written Discourse: A Discourse Analysis of a Student’s Essay Writing.” English Language Teaching 9, no. 7 (2016): 112–19.
Bergh, Gunnar. “7) Football Is War: A Case Study of Minute-by-Minute Football Commentary.” Veredas-Revista de Estudos Linguísticos 15, no. 2 (2011).
Chovanec, Jan. “‘Call Doc Singh!’: Textual Structure And Coherence In Live Text Sports Commentaries.” Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse, 2009, 124–37.
———. “Competitive Verbal Interaction in Online Minute-by-Minute Match Reports.” Brno Studies in English 32, no. 1 (2008): 23–35.
Ghasemi, Mohsen. “An Investigation into the Use of Cohesive Devices in Second Language Writings.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3, no. 9 (2013): 1615.
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood, and Ruqaiya Hasan. Cohesion in English. Routledge, 2014.
Hinkel, Eli,. “What Research on Second Language Writing Tell Us and What It Doesn’t?” In Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning , 2:523–38. Routledge, 2011.
Humpolík, Radek. “Language of Football Commentators: An Analysis of Live English Football Commentary and Its Types.” Masaryk University, 2014.
Karim, Muhammad Fadhli. “ Grammatical and Lexical Cohesion Analysis in Sport News Text On The Jakarta Post.” University of Syarif Hidayatullah, 2015.
Laybutt, Brett Edward. “Collocation and Textual Cohesion: A Comparative Corpus Study Between.” University of Birmingham, 2009.
Lewandowski, Marcin. “The Language of Online Sports Commentary in a Comparative Perspective.” Lingua Posnaniensis 54, no. 1 (2012): 65–76.
Moreno, Ana L. “The Role of Cohesive Devices as Textual Constraints on Relevance: A Discourse-as-Process View.” International Journal of English Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 111–66.
Pérez-Sabater, Carmen, Gemma Peña-Martínez, Ed Turney, and Begoña Montero-Fleta. “A Spoken Genre Gets Written: Online Football Commentaries in English, French, and Spanish.” Written Communication 25, no. 2 (2008): 235–61.
Richard, Arnaud. “Televised Football Commentaries: Descriptions, Narrations & Representations Of A Non-Victory. The European Club Championship Final 1976 (Bayern Munich Vs As Saint-Étienne).” The Linguistics of Football, 2008, 193–202.
Roring, Timmy Ardian. “The Comparisons of Cohesive Devices Used in Online Football News Published by Jakarta Post and Guardian.” Widya Mandala Catholic University, 2016.
Rostami, Gholamreza, and Hamideh Gholami. “A Contrastive Study of Lexical Cohesion Used in Sport Texts of Washington Times and Tehran Times Newspapers Written by English Native and Iranian Non-Native Writers.” Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research 3, no. 1 (2016): 121–32.
Vandenhoek, Tim. “Minute-by-Minute Football Commentary: A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Tense and Community within Online MBM.” (CELE Journal) 23 (2015): 50–65.
Xi, Yan. “Cohesion Studies in the Past 30 Years: Development, Application and Chaos.” Language, Society and Culture 31, no. 1 (2010): 139–47.
Yule, George. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Yusuf, Aliyu Yakubu. “Conceptual Metaphor in the Language of Football Commentary: A Cognitive Semantic Study.” Ganga Journal of Language and Literary Studies 5, no. 4 (2016): 2–17.
Zhou, Lan, and Qiang Sun. “A Contrastive Analysis of Explicit Cohesion in English Advertising Texts and Their Chinese Consecutive Interpretation Versions.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 9, no. 4 (2019): 465–72.
Cornelius Fuumaale Suom-Kogle serves as a Teaching and Research Assistant at the Department of English, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi-Ghana. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in English with Politics as a minor from the same university. His areas of interest are Corpus Linguistics, Academic Discourse, Rhetoric, Multimodality, and English for Academic Purposes.
Osei Yaw Akoto (PhD) teaches English for Academic Purposes, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Studies, Research Methods in English, and Error Analysis in his capacity as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Social Sciences, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He obtained his B.A (Hons) in English Language and Philosophy, MPhil, and PhD in English Language all from the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana. Some of his research interests include Linguistic Landscape, Onomastics, Corpus Linguistics, and Academic Discourse. His publications have appeared in Journals such as Word, Corpus Pragmatics, Onoma, and Linguistic Landscape.
Suom-Kogle, Cornelius Fuumaale & Osei Yaw Akoto. “Grammatical Cohesion in Online Minute-By-Minute Football Commentary,” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 5, no.4 (2024): 448-464. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2024548
© 2024 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Featured
Others
