An analysis of sports announcer talk in Turkish

Abstract

The current study aims to describe macro and micro features of Turkish Sports Announcer Talk (SAT) quantitatively by applying a register analysis on reporting of a volleyball match. While analyzing the macro features, Reaser's (2003) communicative functions were taken into consideration whereas the micro features were analyzed based on the syntactic features described by Ferguson (1983). With this motivation, the first 15 minutes of two volleyball games reported by professional speakers on television during 2020 Tokyo Olympics were analyzed, and the results demonstrated that Turkish volleyball SAT demonstrates all macro structures framed by Reaser (2003) although most of the talk was spared for Action Description and Routines. Additionally, the contextual distribution of lexico-grammatical features Turkish SAT indicated that most of the syntactic features described by Ferguson (1983) as conventional were indeed functional in Turkish volleyball sportscasting context. Furthermore, some new syntactic features unique to Turkish SAT context were also detected. © 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne. Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin, Deutschland. All rights reserved.