Realization of «Victory» and «Defeat» frames in sports Internet-discourse: problem of focusing

Abstract

The relevance of the problem of realization of the frames Victory and Defeat that are linguistically represented in the sports Internet-discourse is due to the fact that in the recent decades scholars both in Russia and abroad develop the theoretical grounds of discourse analysis and pay special attention to different kinds of institutional and professional discourses, and sports discourse possesses two important features aims and participants; thus, sports discourse belongs to the group of institutional discourses and is of great interest for researchers. The aim of the research became the identification of methods that are applied in order to change the focus of the frame; in the course of the study the author solves the following tasks: description of the constituents of the cognitive event model, carrying out linguistic research of sports Internet-discourse fragments and defining the pragmatic goals of the author that in turn influence the frame as a whole. The match reports which are found in the news sections of sport teams` websites were used as the research materials. The study is devoted to the headings of the reports and introductions to them. It is these parts of the articles that contain information about the match outcome that is the basis for the frames under analysis. In the article the following methods were applied: critical discourse analysis as well as quantitative and qualitative methods in the framework of content analysis. Lexical units that were singled out were analyzed from both morphological and semantic perspectives. The study of modern sports Internet-discourse has demonstrated that the authors of match reports tend not only to convey the information about the match results to the readers of the web-site but also to influence their opinion by forming a particular interpretation. The conducted analysis makes it possible to conclude that an intentional shift of focus frame is achieved with the help of various lexical units, word combinations and, especially, evaluative adjectives.