The Expression of Reality in Football News

Abstract

The notion of reality has been reanalyzed since the post-structuralism era as something socially and linguistically constructed. Language shapes reality, allowing the communication of ideas, theories and emotions through words. Through discourse, information is transferred and/or modified in the passages between addresser and addressee. In fact, the speaker may modify information in the transfer process by expressing commitment to the reality of his/her statement. Subjectivity thus becomes the key factor needed in order to understand reality as it is expressed in discourse. The data for this study is online texts drawn from the two major online newspapers and two football teams'' official netpages, with a total of 66 articles and 41,061 words. The corpus consists of editorials and news reports taken from The Guardian online, The Times online and from the official web sites of West Ham and Manchester United. Eleven news reports were selected from the first link available on each page of The Times (6,555 words) and The Guardian (7,818 words). From the comments section, we selected eleven articles from each The Times (8,901 words) and The Guardian (8,962). Eleven texts from the official pages of two popular football teams were taken from the internet, namely from the West Ham official web site (4,646 words) and the Manchester United official web site (4,179 words). This paper is intended to explore the following issues: −The presence and patterning of various dimensions of evidentiality and epistemic modality within two subgenres: sport editorials and sport reports, −The identification and patterning of evidentiality and epistemic modality on sports websites, − Any similarities and differences between these patterns in subgenres.