Genre Determining Prediction: Non-Standard TAM Marking in Football Language

Abstract

German and French football language display tense-aspect-mood (TAM) forms which differ from the TAM use in other genres. In German football talk, the present indicative may replace the pluperfect subjunctive. In French reports of football matches, the imperfective past may occur instead of a perfective past tense-aspect form. We argue that the two phenomena share a functional core and are licensed in the same way, which is a direct result of the genre they occur in. More precisely, football match reports adhere to a precise script and specific events are temporally determined in terms of objective time. This allows speakers to exploit a secondary function of TAM forms, namely, they shift the temporal perspective. We argue that it is on the grounds of the genre that comprehenders predict the deviating forms and are also able to decode them. In various corpus studies, we explore the functioning of these phenomena in order to gain insights into their distribution, grammaticalization and their functioning in discourse. Relevant factors are Aktionsart properties, rhetorical relations and their interaction with other TAM forms. This allows us to discuss coping mechanisms on the part of the comprehender. We broaden our understanding of the phenomena, which have only been partly covered for French and up to now seem to have been ignored in German.