Imagine, if you will, the excited villagers from two neighboring villages booting an inflated pig's bladder (minus pig) up hill and down dale until the bladder reaches one or other village (early football), and the excited boys going home, having won the game, telling their indisposed grandmother of the events that led to the victory; early post hoc sports reporting with the only medium available, talk; then after that the medium of writing also allowed for post hoc sport reportage in newspapers; with the advent of radio, live audio reporting on the airwaves and then live TV reportage. So, with every new medium, new ways of telling about games become available. This book is a detailed and thoughtful description of one of the latest ways of ‘talking’ sport, namely live text commentary, which results from the advent of on-line media.
Not surprisingly given its genesis in a Habilitationsschrift, the book is nothing if not thorough. It drills down to its subject through three stages. In the first section the background literature relating to live text commentary is outlined. The second section analyses the pragmalinguistic properties of live text commentary, while the third section examines how the texts produced by members of the on-line audience to such commentaries can, through having their post interpolated between the commentator's, become part of the total published text.
The data set on which the analysis is based is both large, consisting of on-line match commentaries of the 2008 European Cup and the 2010 World Cup, but also narrow, being confined to commentaries from the Guardian newspaper and limited to football.
After the first introductory chapter, the second outlines the many different approaches to register and genre. Chovanec carefully picks his way through this detailed literature review, concluding that genres ‘belong’ to a discourse community. They have conventional aspects as well as allowing degrees of freedom and creativity, with varying limits.
Chapter 3surveys the literature relating to the linguistic properties of sports commentary, starting from the beginning. Most of the major contributions to the literature are outlined in detail particularly as they bear on on-line commentary. It is notable that many of the accounts of the linguistics of sports commentary are restricted to a limited number of sports, a feature also of Chovanec's later account. That being the case, the detail of the individual accounts is undeniable but generalization is problematic. The exploration of commentary speech suggests that radio and television commentary may be subgenres. This raises the interesting question of the depth of genre analysis. Is the radio commentary of sport X a subgenre of sports commentary in general and is the radio commentary of sport X a different subgenre from that of sport Y? Or are these different genres altogether? The converse question is then, what are the properties of the superordinate genre? Is there such a genre as sports commentary in general and, if so, what are its pragmalinguistic and text type properties? In chapter 4 it is suggested that the notion of a colony of genres is useful to deal with some of this set of problems.
Chapter 4 places on-line sports commentary within the context of sports journalism and also of live blogging in general. One can, for example, follow the proceedings of parliaments and impeachment hearings on the websites of newspapers where reporters provide live blogs. An extensive and well-documented account of the changes this innovation has made to journalism is provided. A detailed description of the way the live-streamed football commentary operates on the Guardian news site follows. The site contains a header-like structure followed by posts that are live-streamed at intervals. They are time stamped with both the actual time of the post and the time before, in, and after the game with its forty-five minutes halves and half-time period. Each of these has its own linguistic properties.
Chapter 5 begins the detailed description of the commentaries themselves. While the study is based on a large corpus it is qualitative in its methodology. As Chovenac puts it, like unscripted radio commentaries these commentaries ‘derive text structure more or less directly from the event structure, and the narration time is co-extensive with the event time’ (99). However, not only events are provided with posts. There are times when commentators talk about matters other than the currently on-going events. An account of different kinds of live text commentary follows. Some are monologues with only the commentator's posts appearing on the website. In a second type, the audience participation appears in the form of posts in parallel with the commentator's post, but without dialogue. In the third type, audience posts are integrated by being interpolated between the commentator's own posts. In the last case, the journalist/commentator functions as a gatekeeper as to which posts are published and as asynchronous dialogue partner.
Chapter 6 looks at time relationships in on-line written sports commentary and the notion of ‘liveness’. First there is the live event: the game that has temporal properties. It has stoppages, for example, when a player is injured. The time taken for these stoppages is added on later. In other words, the stoppage is not part of the temporal sequence of the sport event as such (although, of course, the clock does not stop in the real world; only on the wrist of the referee). Then there are the on-line posts that are also ‘live’ but in quite another sense. They appear when they are posted and then remain unchanged on the website. They appear after the live event on the football pitch has finished and after the commentator has written them. A few posts may prefigure events in the game, for example, the half-time whistle. What constitutes a newsworthy event, that is, worth the commentator's while devoting a post to, is not dealt with in any detail. Such events are bounded and of fairly short duration: a pass, a tackle, a corner, a shot at goal, a save. The author asserts that ‘the purpose for which such texts were produced disappears with the immediate context of production’ (135). They then become ‘mere historical accounts’.
Chapter 7 deals with pre- and post-match commentaries, which are clearly different from commentaries of the play-by-play sections of the game since there is no concurrent play. Chapter 8 deals with breaks in play such as half-time where again there is no live action. As it is throughout the book, the description here is as full from the commentator imitating the referee's whistle to various ways of signing off at the end of the commentary.
Chapters 9 and 10 deal with the ways in which posts by members of the audience are threaded into the commentary. These are interesting chapters since they show that the audience posts are, in the case of this particular genre, aimed at various goals that sometimes have little to do with the on-going action of the game. They may be humorous, partisan, competitive, and create what the author sees as a kind of male bonding forum. There is a strong tendency for the posts to adopt a spoken conversational style, with a quasi-conversational element; quasi because the two parties to the conversation are conversing asynchronously and usually without knowing each other. Chapter 9 includes a detailed and interesting account of how the deictics of here are pragmatically interpreted. Chapter 10 looks at how the commentator's narrative and the audience's posts are intercalated.
Chapter 11 is a summary conclusion.
In sum this is a thorough description of its empirical domain. By placing on-line live commentary within the wider literature of register and genre, and sports commentary in general, this book provides a clear account of a new sports commentary genre. It is, however sometimes so thorough that, in order not to miss anything, it states the obvious. No live commentary is possible during the half-time break because no action takes place on the pitch. Indeed.
But the story does not finish with Chovanec's account. While this is a qualitative study, the phenomena also invite quantitative treatment. Missing from a pragmalinguistic account is how one gets to be an on-line football commentator, and why, as is the case with almost all live play-by-play sports commentary, there are no women involved in this genre. An account and appreciation of the creativity and artistry of some of the posts is also missing. Are these a feature only of Guardian writing? Lastly, the nature of sports events and subevents as cultural artifacts is not explored. Not all that happens on a football pitch receives commentary, in fact very little of what actually happens receives commentary. Why is that? On what basis do commentators select audience posts? An ethnographic study would perhaps provide a fuller account by placing on-line commentary within a wider sociocultural context.
