The evolution of football live text commentaries

Abstract

Since the emergence of online live text commentaries on football games in the late 1990s, the genre has undergone continuous change. While linguistic research on the genre of live text commentaries emphasizes its novelty, the genre has existed in football for at least 20 years. However, diachronic studies still lack. This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of genre and register-specific features of German live text commentaries from 2003 until 2020. Using quantitative methods, it focuses on the distribution of linguistic features on different linguistic (i.e. syntactical, lexical, graphemic etc.) levels over time. It is shown that various markers, which signal a colloquial register and emulate orality in the written mode, decrease, leading to a more impersonal way of reporting. Moreover, markers of individual perspective decrease in favor of a neutralistic stance. Thus, the evolution of live text commentaries can be described as a process of standardization.