Abstract:
Communicating ideas/news is the primary function of language.
However, language does not usually fulfill this as it is expected to. To
Dellinger (1995, p. 3) language, “can never appear by itself-it always
appears as the representative of a system of linguistic terms, which
themselves realize discursive and ideological system.” The present
study, analyzing sports articles, aims at investigating the nature and
importance of discourse in representing the desired players/ or teams. In
other words, it is to examine the ways in which different teams are
discursively constructed. More specifically, it shows how ‘our’ team
versus ‘other’ (rival) team is shaped discursively. To do this, Hodge and
Kress' (1996) model for Critical Discourse Analysis provides the
framework with which the following texts have been approached. Four
sport extracts, selected from two different issues of two different sport
editorials, comprised the corpus of the study. The texts are analyzed
with regard to three important properties of texts, i.e., grammar (with
regard to two properties: syntagmatic models and transformations),
vocabulary (functioning as adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, with their
ideological significance), and modality (the degree of authority and
certainty of an utterance). The study has revealed how the reporters,
while apparently providing the readers with the information about the
matches and important events, represent ‘ours’ and ‘others’ in the
selected texts the way they like and, thereby, influence the ideology of
the reader.
Machine summary:
"In addition, the higher number of nontransactives, most of which describing the actions performed by the players of Persepolis, indicates that the reporter has tried to downplay the action and make the reader believe that these events have either happened by chance or the players of Persepolis did not play a great role in scoring that goal, attack or the like.
Thus in Article 3, the coach, instead of directly showing the actor and the affected, and the performance of the actor in an actional form, has used relationals to mystify the process, for instance: Although our rival was a very good team, we were able to lead the game in Tehran until the 90th minute.
With regard to nominalization, in Article 4, you can see 7 cases (presence, brilliant performance, ball maintenance, creating good opportunities, supporting each other, individual and team play, and sending) which are mostly used to describe the actions of the players of Alittehad for the same reason as the writer has used nontransactives.
For instance, the positive effect of the word good in the following clause is immediately overruled in the following clause by using the disclaimer but; Of course, Esteqlal had a couple of good chances (R), (3) but they did not use them Conclusions Examining the ways the articles exercise control over the perception of the readers, the researchers have noticed that sports texts, like other texts can be ideologically loaded to manipulate and/or control the audience."