A Comparative Study of Criticizing Strategies in English and Japanese Live Football Commentaries

Abstract

The contrastive analysis of Sports Announcer Talk in Japanese and English gives us a fruitful insight into the language structures and communicative characteristics of both languages, in that football games nowadays, both national football leagues and international tournaments, are broadcast and commented on in various languages without translation. This paper examines the communicative strategies of English and Japanese speakers in live football commentaries specifically focusing on the linguistic behaviour used in criticizing players, and endeavours to elucidate how and why speakers of each of the languages show differences in forming the discourse of criticism. It is also pointed out that English and Japanese speakers refer to different cognitive resources in the same events to construct live football commentaries. English commentators describe and analyze players' errors objectively and present their criticism in a direct manner. Japanese commentators, on the other hand, tend to avoid and mitigate their criticisms in commentaries when players make errors. They try to understand players' feelings and intentions and describe players' psychological aspects and the situational factors surrounding players.