Motion events in football and cycling live text commentary: A corpus linguistic analysis.

What is it about?

Based on large annotated corpora of German live ticker reports on football games and cycling races, this paper analyses the varying linguistic means of encoding motion events from the perspective of cognitive semantics. We start from the observation that in football prevail adpositional constructions in the accusative case with directional meaning, e.g. in den Strafraum (‘into the box’). As opposed to football, in cycling live tickers motion tends to be encoded by adpositional constructions in the dative case with locative meaning, e.g. an der Spitze des Hauptfeldes (‘at the top of the peloton’). We argue that in cycle racing motion events are usually profiled as position. These findings can be explained with regard to the different perspectives taken by the camera that allow the spectators to take vectorial, hodological or birds-eye-perspectives on what is going on. Hence, the conveyed images induce different viewing arrangements as is known from cognitive semantics' stage analogy. These arrangements are reflected linguistically in specific construals presenting the ways of conceiving the various frames of moving actors in football games and cycling races.

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Why is it important?

These viewing arrangements are reflected linguistically in specific construals presenting the ways of conceiving the various frames of moving actors in football games and cycling races. Hence, spatial frames of reference and perspectives interact in a culture and language. The corpus tool provides statistical means, the cognitive linguistic parameters help to survey the intricacies of cultures, languages and cognition with respect to spatial cognition.

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