The Pragmatics of Amusement in Selected British Football Commentaries

Sport in general and football in particular have become the most popular form of amusement nowadays throughout the special performance of the commentators who comment on the game. Their duty is to provide the audience with the relevant information about what is happening during the game and to amuse them at the same time. They often do that by using specific linguistic features. The present study mainly tackles amusement in British football commentary language from a pragmatic point of view by selecting (2) football matches of (4) British commentators who are Martin Tyler, Andy Gray, Alan Perry and Gary Neville. As such, it is carried out with the aim of exploring the phases of commentaries according to which the football commentary is considered amusing, identifying the strategies of commentary used by the commentators in each phase, specifying the pragmatic devices used in each strategy of football commentaries which make these commentaries amusing. On the basis of the analysis, the following conclusions can be made: The commentaries are achieved in three phases, i.e., play-by-play, colour commentary and action replay which make the commentaries as amused, the commentaries are structured out of three strategies, descriptive, dramatic and humorous, and in the whole pragmatic structure of amusement in football commentaries, each strategy is variously fulfilled by means of certain pragmatic devices associated with it to achieve amusement.