Book Review : Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports (Texts, Media, Modalities)

Abstract

The submitted work is a book review of Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports: Texts, Media, Modalities edited by Marcus Callies and Magnus Levin. The volume brings together empirical studies that adopt corpus methods to examine language in a variety of genres and contexts of different types of sports. Structurally, it comprises an introductory chapter and ten empirical studies, where the introductory chapter (Chapter 1) lays down the theoretical and methodological context, while the following ten empirical studies (Chapter 2-11) are divided into three parts. Part one ‘Texts. Contrastive and comparative aspects of the phraseology of football match reports’ (Chapter 2-4) explores the phraseology of football reporting across different text types and languages by adopting a comparative/contrastive linguistic approach. Part two ‘Media. Expanding the scope of research to mew contexts of use’ (Chapter 5-8) extends the existing research to new media and the relatively downplayed sports discourse outside of football. The final part ‘Modalities. Multimodal studies’ (Chapter 9-11) addresses sports language from a multimodal perspective which has rarely been applied to the language of sports. On the whole, as the only book dealing with sports in the Corpus and Discourse series, the present volume makes a strong contribution to corpus linguistics and the application of corpus linguistic methods to the discourse and contexts of sports.