Paying the penalty for dishonesty: Evaluative language in Scottish football

Abstract

Scottish soccer has frequently been a mirror reflecting sectarian tensions at play in society at large, tensions which can make 'Old Firm' matches between the Glasgow teams of Celtic and Rangers something more serious than a game of football. This study explores an incident during which a referee told a trivial lie to the Celtic manager and, because of the ensuing media storm, was eventually forced to resign. During a radio programme discussing the incident various views are put forward, both for and against the referee. I suggest that, in order to account for the evaluative patterns used by the studio pundits and some of the participants in the incident, it is necessary to have some understanding of the underlying social context. The suggestion is that the underlying social features may be responsible for local discursive effects such as graduation, lexical choices and judgemental patterns. An attempt is thus made to connect broad notions of context such as those of Malinowski (1923), and more particularly Hyatt (2005), with more specific effects at the level of discourse. The Appraisal Framework (Martin and White 2005) is used to explore the evaluative representations in the data, particularly those in the area of Judgement.