An Interactional Study of Reporting Activity in Japanese Live Car Racing Commentary: Interjections as Event Markers and the Construction of Reporting Utterances

Abstract

In live sports commentary, the participants (announcer and commentator(s)) frequently need to single out events to report while talking about other matters. The target events emerge from the ongoing situation, and can disappear instantly. By analyzing the recorded data of live TV car race commentary in Japanese, we show that the participants use interjections such as ‘a’ or ‘otto’ as a procedure to single out events instantly. Although both the announcer and the commentator(s) equally use this procedure, they construct subsequent reporting utterances of the event differently. We demonstrate how the participants orient to their different roles, and how they construct the reporting utterances interactively during the commentary.