Pragmatics of Sports News Reports

Abstract

The paper aims to build the structure of sports news reports by bridging them to pragmatics hence coming up with their pragmatic structure. Accordingly, two pragmatic concepts (viz. cooperative principle and speech acts) are believed to be helpful in performing this task. Moreover, the notion of dialectical relevance, developed by Walton (1995), is utilized. This is done by pragmatically analyzing eight news reports of different sports (football, tennis, formula1, and golf, respectively) taken from the BBC sports official website. The analysis is carried out by means of an eclectic model developed by the study itself to serve this aim. This type of analysis is supported by a statistical analysis to quantitatively validate its findings. The two types of analysis basically show that there are no major differences between the games analyzed as to employing the various strategies compiling the aforementioned analytic tool.