NBA即席解说词的功能文体学研究
A Functional Stylistic Approach to the Study of
Impromptu NBA Commentaries
NBA即席解说词的功能文体学研究
A Dissertation Submitted to
the Graduate School of Henan University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts
By
Gaojinmiao
Supervisor: Prof. Zhang Ke
March, 2013
Acknowledgements
I am truly grateful to all those people who have been instrumental in bringing this thesis to fruition. Without all sorts of invaluable encourage, guidance and support, I could not have successfully accomplished it.
First of all, I would like to present my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Zhang Ke, whose patient instructions, painstaking efforts, enlightening guidance and constant encouragement have contributed immensely to the completion of this thesis. Her valuable advice and direction have drawn my attention to a number of deficiencies for improvement and have made many things clearer for me. The most precious treasure I gained from her is the precision in doing research, which I believe will continue to benefit me in my future research.
Secondly, I feel deeply indebted to all those teachers who have instructed and enlightened me during my post-graduate studies in the School of Foreign Languages, Henan University.
I also owe my friends, who have shared my happiness and frustrations during this research.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their support and encouragement.
Abstract
NBA, as the biggest National Basketball Association in the United States, is drawing attention from all over the world. Impromptu NBA commentary is as interesting, vivid and wonderful as the game itself, and it is very different from other spoken varieties such as news, speech and so on. However, at present, a comprehensive and in-depth study of this variety from the functional perspective has not been well attempted. Based on a synthetical mode for foregrounding feature analysis, this thesis just offers a functional-stylistic approach to impromptu NBA commentary.
This study recognizes that language is constructed and also exists in the social reality. The formation of the discourse is restricted by context of situation and social functions. The social function of impromptu NBA commentary is to report the important information of the competition in a quick, objective and not boring way, which determines the linguistic features of the discourse.
Based on the five videos downloaded from the NBA official website, the present thesis adopts both the qualitative and quantitative approaches and analyzes the foregrounding features of impromptu NBA commentary at the phonological, lexical, grammatical and semantic levels.
This paper employs the top-down method, gives an analysis of the context of situation of impromptu NBA commentary first, then put forward the social functions and then summarizes the macroscopical linguistic features of this discourse: vividness, concisity, objectivity, rapidity, precisity, simplicity, clarity, action-packedness and looseness. In terms of the macroscopical linguistic features, this paper makes a detailed analysis about how they are realized at the four levels through the two foregrounding devices —deflection and incongruity.
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In terms of the study, the author finds that at the phonological level, vividness is realized by the flexible use of stress and loudness, rapidity is realized by the fast tempo and the short pauses; At the Lexical level, simplicity is realized by the frequent use of short words and low vocabulary intensity, precisity is realized by the technical terms and jargons, objectivity is realized by the frequent use of numerals, action-packedness is realized by high proportion of action verbs, clarity is realized by the frequent use of proper nouns, concisity is realized by the high frequency of ellipsis, definity is realized by the fewer use of the pet phrases, vividness is realized by the subjective use of adjectives and adverbs; At the grammatical level, action-packedness is realized by the overwhelming majority of material processes, objectivity is realized by the great majority of statements and little use of modality, simplicity is realized by the majority of active voices, simple present tense and unmarked themes, looseness is realized by the single use of the conjunctio n ―and‖, clarity is realized by the semantic cohesive ties; At the semantic level, precisity is realized by the avoidance of using vague reference, vividness is realized by the appropriate use of humorous remarks and rhetorical devices.
The study divides all these linguistic forms into two large categories, one is quantitative prominence, i.e. deflection and the other is qualitative prominence, i.e. incongruity. All these features relate closely to the functions in the context of situation, and as a result, become the foregrounding features of this variety.
This thesis is intended for a better recognition of the foregrounding features of impromptu NBA commentary and making some constructive suggestions on the English learning and the cultivating of the professional commentators, which can help the students get the knowledge of the linguistic features on a macro point, and then promote their capability for appreciating and commentating.
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Key Words: functional-stylistics; foregrounding; impromptu NBA commentary; deflection; incongruity
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摘要
NBA，作为美国第一大职业篮球赛事，越来越吸引着全球的目光，而NBA 即席解说词也正如NBA比赛本身一样有趣，生动，精彩。与其它口语语体，如新闻，演讲等大不相同，表现出其独有的语言特点。目前从功能语言学角度对该类语篇进行全面、深入的研究还是极少数的，本文运用功能文体学中语篇前景化理论的综合分析模式，对NBA即席解说词进行了深入全面的研究。
本研究认为，语言存在于社会现实，又构建于社会现实。语篇的形成受制于语境和社会功能。NBA即席解说词的主要社会功能是解说员紧随比赛的进行，对比赛的过程做出快速、有趣，客观的解说。这一功能决定了语篇的形成，从而进一步决定了该语篇的语言特色。
本文以NBA官方网站上下载的5 个视频资料作为本研究的语料，采用定量分析和定性分析相结合的方法，分析在社会功能的决定下，NBA即席解说词在音系、词汇语法以及语义结构层面的前景化特征。
本文基于功能文体学的分析框架，采用自上而下的分析方法，首先分析了NBA即席解说词的情景语境，提出该语篇的主要社会功能，并总结了宏观上该语篇的语言特色——生动性，简洁性，快速性，确定性，客观性，准确性，动作性，简单性，清晰性，松散性。根据这些宏观的语言特色，文章具体分析了这些语言特色通过前景化的两种方式——失衡和失协，在音系、词汇语法以及语义结构层面的实现方式。在音系层，生动性是由重音，音强等的独特运用来实现，快速性是由语速以及短暂停顿来实现；在词汇层，简单性是由词汇长度短，词汇密度小来实现，准确性是由技术用语和行话以及数词的多次使用来实现，动作性是由动词的大量使用来实现，清晰性是由专有名词的频繁使用来实现，生动性是由形容词和副词的使用来实现，简洁性是由大量的省略来实现，确定性是由口头语的极少出现来实现；在语法层，动作性是由物质过程的大量使用来实现，客观性是由大量的陈述语气和零情态来实现，简单性是由大量的主动语态，一般现在时态和无标记主位来实现，松散性是由连词的单一少量使用来实现，清晰性是由语义衔接带来实现；在语义层，准确性是由避免使用模糊指代来实现，生动性是由幽默语言以及修辞手法的适当运用来实现。这些语言手段既包括数量上的突出即失衡，也包括质量上的IV
突出即失协，二者都与它们在情景语境中的功能有着极高的相关性，因此也就成了本语篇的前景化特征。
本文通过分析NBA即席解说词的语篇功能在语言层面上的实现方式，探讨了该语篇对于英语学习者以及专业解说员的培养在教学上的启示，有助于学生从宏观上把握语篇的语言特点，并从微观上了解该语篇的语言特色，从而提高他们对NBA即席解说词的欣赏能力和解说水平。
关键词：功能文体学；前景化；NBA即席解说词；失衡；失协
V
List of Figures
Figure 3-1 A Synthetical Mode for Foregrou nding Feature Analysis (15)
Figure 4-1 Situational Configuration and Sem antic Configuration (18)
VI
List of Tables
Table 5-1 Prosodic Features (24)
Table 5-2 Length of Words (29)
Table 5-3 V ocabulary In tensity (30)
Table 5-4 Parts of Sp eech (31)
Table 5-5 Distribution of Process Types in the 5 Samples (35)
Table 5-6 Distribution of Tense in the 5 Samples (48)
VII
Contents
Abstract...................................................................................................................................... I 摘要...................................................................................................................................... I V List of Figures ......................................................................................................................... V I List of Tables.......................................................................................................................... V II Chapter One Introduction. (1)
1.1 Research Background (1)
1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study (2)
1.3 Data Collection and Methodology (3)
1.4 Layout of the Thesis (3)
Chapter Two Literature Review (5)
2.1 Studies at Home on Impromptu Sports Commentaries (5)
2.2 Studies Abroad on Impromptu Sports Commentaries (5)
2.3 Major Findings in Previous Researches (6)
2.4 Deficiencies in Previous Researches (7)
Chapter Three Theoretical Framework (8)
3.1 Style (8)
3.2 Theories of Foregrounding (10)
3.2.1 Formalism and Defamiliarization (10)
3.2.2 Structualists‘ Foregrounding Theory (10)
3.2.3 Leech‘s Synthesis of the Foregrounding Theory (12)
3.2.4 Halliday‘s Conception of Foregrounding Theory (13)
3.3 A Synthetical Mode for Foregrounding Feature Analysis (14)
VIII
Chapter Four Contextual Factors Analysis of Impromptu NBA Commentaries (17)
4.1 Context of Situation (17)
4.1.1 Field of Discourse (18)
4.1.2 Tenor of Discourse (19)
4.1.3 Mode of Discourse (19)
4.2 Functions of Language (19)
4.3 Macroscopical Linguistic Features Restricted by Context of Situation (20)
Chapter Five Foregrounding Features in Impromptu NBA Commentaries (22)
5.1 Deflection in Impromptu NBA Commentaries (22)
5.1.1 Phonological Deflection (22)
5.1.2 Lexical deflection (31)
5.1.3 Grammatical Deflection (37)
5.2 Incongruity in impromptu NBA commentary (47)
5.2.1 Lexical Incongruity (48)
5.2.2 Grammatical Incongruity (50)
5.2.3 Semantic Incongruity (53)
Chapter Six Conclusion (57)
6.1 Findings (57)
6.2 Limitations (62)
6.3 Recommendations for Further Studies (63)
Bibliography (64)
IX
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
With the increasingly improvement of the living standard, people are now seeking for more spiritual enjoyment rather than material fortune alone. Naturally, sports, as a sign of social and cultural civilization, have gradually taken on a national flavor. More and more people have an intense pursuit to take part in athletics such as basketball, football, table tennis etc. So a lot of professional sports games emerged such as NFL (National Football League), MLB (Major League Baseball), NBA (National Basketball Association) and NHL (National Hockey League). When people take part in sports, they can feel the real exhilaration and complete relax. Since the athletes are selected from the whole world, so the ideals of teamwork and tolerance can also help promote international cooperation and world peace.
NBA is the abbreviation of National Basketball Association. It is the world's premier men's professional basketball league, representing the highest level in the world. It shares all the advantages of the sports above. Billions of people in the world are crazy about it.
The league was founded in New York City, United States on June 6, 1946 as the Basketball Association of America (BAA). The league adopted the name National Basketball Association in the autumn of 1949 after merging with the rival National Basketball League.
At first, there were only 11 teams. Afterwards, some teams joined NBA one after another. In 2004, the Charlotte Bobcats team joins in NBA, and then the team sum reached 30.
The 30 teams in NBA are divided into two alliances---east and west alliance, each has 15 teams. There are three divisions in each alliance separately. East alliance can be divided to
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Northwest, Southwest and Pacific division. West alliance is divided to central, southeast and Atlantic divisions.
The NBA is divided into regular season and playoffs. The regular season begins from the second Tuesday of first week in November to the end of April in the next year. For the round-robin regular season, each team must complete 82 game (expect 1998 and 2012). The top eight teams of each alliance, including the champion of each division, will be eligible to enter the next playoff and go for the championship. The playoff has four rounds, and adopts the system of winning 4 out of 7 games. The fourth round is also called the NBA finals. The champions of the two alliances go for the last championship—the highest honor of NBA.
This is a brief introduction to the NBA. For the NBA commentary, the commentator has no manuscript sketches, and speaks very fast to keep up with the quick competition. However, it is still as interesting and vivid as the game itself. In order to attract more people in the program, the commentator always uses his unique commentary technique and brings the audience to their highest sprits in terms of different situations. Therefore, it is very different from other spoken varieties.
1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
Due to the unique features of impromptu NBA commentaries, this paper aims at making a thorough inquiry into this register at the levels of phonology, lexis, grammar and semantics, and tries to find out all the foregrounding features based on the functional stylistic theory.
There are several values on this research. First, it broadens the scope under the theoretical framework of functional grammar, and arouses more attention of the researchers to study other kinds of language variety in commentaries. Second, it can help TV audience and Chinese learners of English understand and appreciate the NBA commentary language better. Third, it is also helpful to train the professional Chinese commentators, helping them develop
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their language skills and do much better work in this field.
1.3 Data Collection and Methodology
Commentary is a descriptive spoken account (especially on radio or television ) of a performance or an event as it happens (Thompson, 1999：265). Impromptu commentaries consist of TV commentaries and radio commentaries. Since TV commentaries are available to give audience visual appreciation besides the audio enjoyment, and nowadays most young people seldom listen to the radio, so the present research just focuses on the live TV commentaries, and take the impromptu NBA commentaries as the object of the study. In order to do this work better, the author has built a data base based on the impromptu NBA commentaries, in which all the videos are downloaded from the official web site of the NBA. All generalizations and conclusions will be derived from the analysis of these samples.
In order to reveal the nature of the selected data better, both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in the research. These two approaches are co-present and complimentary. The quantitative method is employed to count up the number of each prominent feature that appears in the corpus, which can make the study authentic and objective. The qualitative method is adopted to explain how these prominent features become foregrounding, that is to say how these distinctive features are related to the context of situation. So these two approaches together can make the study more confirmatory and explanatory.
1.4 Layout of the Thesis
Based on the theory of foregrounding under the framework of functional- stylistic analysis, the thesis has been divided into five chapters, and the focus of each chapter is given below in advance for the benefit of convenient reference.
Chapter One serves as a brief introduction to the whole thesis by providing the necessary
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information about this paper such as research background, purpose and significance of the study, data collection, methodology and layout of the thesis.
In the second chapter, the author gives a literature review about the impromptu sports commentaries at home and abroad.
In the third chapter, the author first describes the development of the foregrounding theory from ancient times to the present, and then proposes the synthetical mode for foregrounding feature analysis which is adopted in this thesis.
In the fourth chapter, the situational contextual factors of impromptu NBA commentaries are analyzed to make clear of the macroscopic linguistic features.
In the Fifth chapter, the author analyzes how these macroscopic linguistic features are realized by the two devices of foregrounding—deflection and incongruity, at the four levels of phonology, lexis, grammar and semantics.
The last chapter serves as the conclusion of the thesis, in which major findings, limitations as well as suggestions for future study are tentatively made.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
This part mainly deals with the previous studies at home and abroad on the impromptu sports commentaries and also gives a summary to the major finding and deficiencies in the past researches.
2.1 Studies at Home on Impromptu Sports Commentaries
Up to the present, a functional-stylistic approach to the impromptu commentary has never been seen, not to say the impromptu NBA commentary. Nevertheless, there are some related researches. Followings are the studies at home.
As early as 1987，Wang Zuoliang ＆Ding Wangdao have discussed impromptu football commentaries from the aspects of syntactic structure, lexis, phonology, semantics and text, but the data they collected are hypothetical from Advanced English Course (The Linguaphone Institute).
He Pingxiang (2006) made a linguistic analysis on impromptu NBA commentaries at the phonological, lexical, syntactic, and textual levels in her MA degree thesis. Her study gave a relative overall linguistic cognition about the features of impromptu NBA commentaries.
Zuo Huifen (2007) made a cultural contrastive study of the Chinese and American impromptu sports commentaries based on NBA commentaries. Her study focuses on three differences between Chinese and American commentators: frequency of the use of exclamatory sentences, sense of humor and frequency of statistics quoted.
2.2 Studies Abroad on Impromptu Sports Commentaries
Besides the studies at home, there are also some related studies on impromptu
commentary abroad.
Beard‘s (1998) The Language of sport is a textbook offering students hands-on practical experience of textual analysis focused on the language of sport. Beard, taking football commentaries as an example, generalizes some obvious language features of impromptu television commentaries and radio commentaries from pronunciation, meaning and grammar, and makes a comparison between radio commentaries and television commentaries. The writer also proposes some suggestions for students‘ future study on commentary.
Crystal and Da vy (1969) have analyzed ―The Language of Unscripted Commentary‖ on cricket. It is a study of radio commentary. From the stylistic point of view, they attribute impromptu commentary to spoken language and make a survey on its stylistic features from phonological, grammatical, and lexical levels.
Ferguson (1983) has analyzed the language of American baseball. But their studies are related only to spoken commentaries broadcast on the radio.
Ghadessy (1988) has analyzed written sports commentaries by using computer facilities.
2.3 Major Findings in Previous Researches
Taking it all around, the previous studies have made some achievements, which can be summarized as below:
1. Impromptu sports commentaries, as a variety of spoken language, have many features in common with other varieties of spoken English in phonology, grammar and discourse, such as incompleteness, normal non-fluency, casual topic, semantic ambiguity etc..
2. With the development of stylistics, great progress has been made in referring to impromptu sports commentaries as a kind of style and presenting its language features from linguistic and stylistic point of view.
3. A culturally contrastive study between Chinese and Western impromptu sports commentary has been approached.
2.4 Deficiencies in Previous Researches
Hard work as the previous researchers put in this field, there are also some deficiencies.
1. Most of the previous studies are based on personal experience and standpoint, therefore lacking in the theoretical support and persuasiveness.
2. The previous studies simply focus on language description, and fail to explain why and how language features are produced and what makes the style of impromptu sport commentaries different from other language variety.
3. Most of the previous studies are restricted to radio commentaries and take slow games as examples of analysis. For examples, Crystal and Davy‘s study (1969) covers many possible levels of stylistic point of view but what they discussed is radio commentaries and they took cricket game, a slow game, as a case study. Furthermore, since their data and instrument of analysis are already out of date, the instructive role of results is limited.
4. A functional stylistic approach to the stylistic study of impromptu NBA commentaries has seldom been approached.
Chapter Three Theoretical Framework
3.1 Style
To do a reasonable research of stylistic analysis, first of all, we should be clear about the question —what is style. This is a contentious issue which has been heatedly disputed among the stylistic scholars. They define style from different perspectives and with different focuses, therefore get different interpretations to style. So till now there has been no definition that is generally acknowledged. Liu Shisheng，speaking of the complexity and difficulty in defining what the style is, he lists 31 definitions. Here are them:
(1) Style as form — Aristotle
(2) Style as equivalence — Jakobson
(3) Style as function — The Prague School approach
(4) Style as foregrounding — Mukarovsky, Leech and Short
(5) Style as deviation — Mukarovsky and Spitzer
(6) Style as prominence — Halliday
(7) Style as rhetoric — Gorgias
(8) Proper words in proper places — Swifts
(9) Le style, c‘est l‘homme meme (style is the man itself) — Buffon
(10) Le style, c‘est a jouter a une pensee donnee toutes les circonstances proper a produire
tout l‘effet que produire cette pensee.— Stendhal
(11) Style as technique of exposition — Murry
(12) Style as personal idiosyncrasy — Murry
(13) Style as the highest achievement of literature — Murry
(14) Saying the right thing in the most effective way — Enkvist
(15) Style as the choice between alternative expressions — Enkvist
(16) Style as a shell surrounding a preexisting core of thought or expression —Enkvist
(17) Style as a set of collective characteristics —Enkvist
(18) Style as those relationship among linguistic entities that are stable in terms of wider
spans of text than the sentences —Enkvist
(19) Style as formal overdetermination — Riffaterre
(20) Style as transformation — Ohmann
(21) Style as eloquence — Cicero
(22) Style as expressiveness — Ullman
(23) Style as meaning potential — Halliday
(24) Style as the linguistic features that communicate emotion or thought — Murry
(25) Style as depth — Darbyshire
(26) Style as a choice among the non-distinctive features of language — Bloomfield
(27) Style as the variety of language restricted by the context — Enkvist
(28) Style is a superfluous term that has no difference from form or expression — Croce
(29) Style is not the inheritance of expression, but that of a quoting process, a set of
patterns, a culture — Barthes
(30) Style in one sense is synonymous with language — Wales
(31) Style as the selection of features partly determined by the demands of genre, form,
theme, etc. — Wales
(刘世生，1998: 9-11) In spite of discrepancy and overlapping, these definitions are good enough to capture all the main features of the conception of style. Among all these definitions, there are three most influential ones in modern stylistics, namely style as deviation, style as choice, and style as