Indicating Occurrences in Live Sports Television Commentary

The Functions of ‘Ko’ Deictic Expressions and the Interjection ‘Hora’

Abstract

In live sports television commentary, when the announcer and the commentator make comments, occasionally they need to indicate the events promptly which emerge from the ongoing situation on the screen. In this research, we investigated live auto racing television commentaries to describe how they accomplish this task by deploying linguistic resources. We show how the announcer and commentator use deictic expressions with ‘Ko’ particles (or in combination with other interjections like ‘Ah’) and the interjection ‘Hora’ to achieve such exophoric reference. These linguistic resources function in different ways. The ‘Ko’ particle ‘Kore’, which is located at beginning of the utterance, is use to attract others’ attention to the unfolding situation, and show the speaker’s grasp of the situation at the same time, whereas the interjection ‘Hora’ is used to indicate the events that the speaker predicted before. We also show such exophoric referential practices are involved with the embodiments of the announcer and the commentators’ identities in the television commentary.