Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 18551858

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Book review
Football, Language and Linguistics. Time-critical Utterances in Unplanned Spoken Language, Their
Structures and Their Relation to Non-linguistic Situations and Events
Torsten Muller, Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2007. 390 pp., s78. ISBN 978-3-8233-6356-9
At first sight, the main title of Mullers extensive monograph may seem misleading: it is not primarily the study of
the language of sports but, as the subtitle indicates, an elaborate account of spoken language production. The authors
choice of football commentary as the primary material for analysis is particularly fitting not only because this text type
has rarely been studied to this depth but also because it ideally serves his research aim: to investigate the way
unplanned spoken language comes into existence. His focus is on utterances occurring as unpremeditated reactions to
extralinguistic reality, which, in this case, consists of non-linguistic situations and events associated with a football
match. On the most general level, the book deals with the production of spontaneous spoken discourse, the
segmentation of language, and the relationship between intonation units and syntactic units.
Mullers point of departure is intonation. While traditional linguistic approaches rely significantly on syntactic
dependencies, the author argues that such a perspective cannot adequately describe units of spoken language. Instead,
he opts for delimiting stretches of discourse in terms of intonation units, which then may (but do not have to) be
classified in terms of syntactic analysis as real or potential syntactic units. Importantly, intonation is not seen as some
kind of additional layer to syntax but as the level that shapes the units before any syntactic consideration can enter
the picture (p. 17). Segmentation of spoken language into intonation units, however, is not performed mechanically:
Muller takes into account the non-linguistic situation to which speech production is closely linked. Here he proceeds
by identifying non-linguistic events (specifying a number of event types in the case of football commentary) and
matching each such non-linguistic event with a particular linguistic structure used for its description.
The theoretical framework for Mullers study is elaborated in Chapter 2. He starts with an overview of previous
studies on the language of live football commentary, particularly those that deal with syntactic issues in English and
German material. Connections between various authors are meticulously traced, mainly with respect to distinguishing
the two main levels of sports commentary which Muller calls description and elaboration.1 This distinction is
crucial because it may fundamentally affect unplanned speech production: while there are serious time constraints
governing the description parts of sports commentary (since the commentator will typically try to describe the nonlinguistic events shortly after their occurrence), the elaboration part of the commentary tends to be syntactically more
complex and its production is not subject to similar temporal and planning constraints. In fact, elaboration may
consist of quite extensive narrative stretches filling an otherwise inactive period of the game, i.e. a period involving the
lack of describable non-linguistic events on the pitch.
The authors focus on the descriptive level of commentary stems from his interest in the production circumstances
of unplanned spoken language, i.e. on time-critical utterances (p. 45). The notion of time-critical utterances is closely
tied with the non-linguistic events to which linguistic structures forming the descriptive level of commentary are
anchored. In particular, Muller deals with what he calls on-line references, i.e. those utterances that start to be

Other scholars make a similar distinction using even more finely tuned divisions, ultimately inspired by Crystal and Davy (1969), and Ferguson
(1983); cf. Rosenbaums (1978) Aktionstext/Nachtragstext, Cruz-Sacos (1987) Narratio/Kommentar, Delins (2000) narrating/evaluating/
elaborating/summarizing, Williams (2002) narrative commentary/commentarial situation/demonstration situation, Kuipers (1996) descriptive
play-by-play mode/color commentary mode.
0378-2166/$ see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.04.008

1856

Book review

verbalized no more than 0.28 s before and no more than 0.72 s after the completion of a corresponding event. Off-line
references are, by extension, all verbalizations starting later than 0.72 s and may include utterances made even minutes
after the occurrence of the relevant event or situation. There is a third time frame distinguished on the level of
description, namely anticipation, since commentators may start describing an event or a situation on the basis of
clear visual cues shortly before it actually happens. The temporal boundaries between the categories reflect the
commentators reaction time since they are measured on the basis of an alignment between non-linguistic situations
and events as they are visually broadcast and the commentators actual verbalizations of such situations and events.
The linguistic output is thus shaped by timing, i.e. the relation between the moment an utterance is made and the
occurrence of the event it describes.
The link between linguistic structures and non-linguistic events and situations is grounded in cognitive linguistics,
mainly the works of Chafe (e.g. 1994, 1998) and Tomlin (e.g. 1997, 1998). Perception of the extralinguistic reality is
linked to cognitive processes and interpreted as resulting in segmentation (unitization) through language. However,
there is a problem with delimiting actions or events as existing objectively, since the perception of them already
requires categorization and interpretation. Yet, the subjectivity inherent in ones perception may, to a certain extent, be
overcome in the case of sports, because the rule-based nature of sport can help determine events as certain
discontinuous constructs. In the authors view, stereotypicality may, in fact, be a main factor in discriminating
events (p. 65). Events are then described semantically, with reference to such categories as scripts, plans, episodes,
and the atemporal Geschehenstypes. The latter, as abstract semantic relations of activities, objects, places or
participants (p. 72) with a semantic core around which these elements cluster, may help establish several specific
types which can be used to describe almost all events occurring in a game of football. They include: playing football,
attacking, defending, stopping the ball, passing the ball, scoring a goal, and tackling. After extensive and
insightful discussions of various approaches, Muller arrives at his own classification of event types.
A major part of the second section is also devoted to the interplay between syntax and prosody. Pointing out that the
interactive nature of naturally occurring unplanned spoken dialogue [. . .] structures spoken language and acts as
another layer that is superimposed on syntax (p. 116), Muller argues for a model of linguistic description which will
incorporate not only intonation (while reducing the role of syntax) but also on-line text production, i.e. the unplanned
nature of spoken language. Drawing on Auer (e.g. 1996, 2000), the author operates with the notion of on-line syntax,
particularly the process of projection (for the most recent overview of these concepts, see Auer, 2009). This process
opens up a syntactic gestalt which allows listeners to predict the rest of the utterance. With every new structure
introduced into an utterance, the syntactic commitment increases and fewer and fewer syntactic options remain open.
In English, for instance, an initial adverbial leaves open virtually everything as no syntactic projections have been
opened up (p. 119) unlike, for instance, in German, where a finite verb typically has to follow. Consequently, such a
syntactic gestalt allows sports commentators in English to keep open the possibilities of continuing their fragmentary
non-clausal utterances to a greater extent than in German sports commentary, as the author demonstrates further on in
the analytical part of his work.
The ideas of projection in on-line syntax and the syntactic commitment are very convincing from the comparative
cross-linguistic perspective adopted by Muller. Clearly, the initial placement of an adverbial allows the English
commentators to overcome, to a certain degree, the constraints of the English fixed word order to which they would be
syntactically committed by opening the utterance with some other sentence constituent (most notably the subject). In
this connection, it would certainly be interesting to explore how languages whose word order is not fixed operate with
respect to on-line syntax and projection. Arguably, their free word order would seem to afford them significantly more
freedom to continue after opening the sentence, thus rendering the relationship between their syntactic gestalt and
the syntactic commitment rather different from languages such as English or German. This contrast becomes
particularly acute in the case of German, where the syntactic commitment of the verb in the second position seems to
function as a straight-jacket, limiting the speakers choices in encoding as well as the hearers expectations of what is
likely to follow.
The bridging of syntax with the prosodical system is achieved with the help of Chafes intonation units (which he
originally called idea units). On-line production, seen from the point of view of information flow, is a creative activity
in that a speaker frames an event, essentially assigning a syntactic structure according to his or her perspective. In this
view, language provides a means for organizing thought or experience into ideas or categories, [. . .] orientations (e.g.
in time through the tense system) and [. . .] constructions (e.g. certain grammatical or grammaticalised constructions
[. . .]) (p. 147). As regards sports reporting, commentators need to verbalize certain stereotypical situations almost on

Book review

1857

a daily basis and such situations may be subject to what Chafe calls high codability, potentially resulting in the use of
formulaic language. Commentators may then develop strategies of associating certain recurring stereotypical events
with certain linguistic structures or items, [. . .] to speed up retrieval of linguistic form for verbalization (p. 157).
After providing this very extensive and detailed theoretical background, the book proceeds in Chapter 3 with the actual
analysis of transcripts of several football games. The material aligns radio commentary with a description of the video
recordings of the relevant games in a systematic and schematic representation devised by the author. The transcripts
ingenuously combine descriptions of the non-linguistic reality of the game with their verbalizations. While the former are
broken down into several clearly defined categories of situation and event types, the latter are segmented according to
intonation units, with syntactic patterning subservient to prosodical segmentation. Mullers methodology is rigorous in
this respect because he resists post-hoc interpretations and favours the emergence of the units in the actual act of
the production of unplanned spoken language. This is, of course, the result of the fact that an utterance may start to be
formulated even before the completion of the event under description; any notions of the speakers pre-planning
the utterance and intending it as a single unit are thus inopportune. What often results is a certain garden-path effect: the
interplay between intonation, syntax and semantics may actually lead to ambiguities that hearers are able to resolve only
retrospectively.
What follows is a highly detailed analysis of the individual event and situation types with respect to their
verbalizations (syntactic structures, lexical preferences, etc.). The approach in this part of the work is comparative:
the author contrasts English and German commentators, pointing out differences between the commentating styles in
the respective languages, as well as the idiosyncratic styles used by different English commentators on the one hand
and different German commentators on the other. The analysis convincingly reveals the use of patterns of
stereotypical structures (e.g. starting point structures, clauses, finite verb structures, etc.), which is in harmony with
the authors premise that such formulaic language will facilitate the on-line production of unplanned spoken
language.
Mullers account offers a fresh and exciting approach to the study of spoken language. The book is very wellresearched and provides an applicable synthesis of syntactic, semantic and cognitivist perspectives. Articulating his ideas
in a very clear style, Muller has the gift of explaining difficult concepts in a lucid way and identifying interesting
connections between the large numbers of sources he brings into the picture. The theoretical framework elaborated in the
first part is an insightful extension of previous approaches and will undoubtedly prove fruitful for the future study of
spoken language. The methodology worked out in the second, analytical, part of the book provides an applicable model
for a systematic analysis of the extralinguistic reality on the basis of intonational segmentation rather than on syntactic
dependencies. The application of the model in other text types may bring promising results, e.g. in the realm of multimodal analysis in areas where the verbal channel provides an accompanying description of events transmitted through the
visual channel.
References
Auer, Peter, 1996. The pre-front field in spoken German and its relevance as a grammaticalization position. Pragmatics 6, 295322.
Auer, Peter, 2000. On-line Syntax Oder: was es bedeuten konnte, die Zeitlichkeit der mundlichen Sprache ernst zu nehmen. Sprache und Literatur
85, 4356.
Auer, Peter, 2009. On-line syntax: thoughts on the temporality of spoken language. Language Sciences 31, 113.
Chafe, Wallace, 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Chafe, Wallace, 1998. Things we can learn from repeated tellings of the same experience. Narrative Inquiry 8, 269285.
Cruz-Saco, Alvaro, 1987. Fuballreportagen im Peruanischen und Deutschen Horfunk: Eine Empirische, Sprachvergleichende Untersuchung.
Hochschulverlag, Freiburg im Breisgau.
Crystal, David, Davy, Derek, 1969. Investigating English Style. Edward Arnold, London.
Delin, Judy, 2000. The Language of Everyday Life. Sage, London.
Ferguson, Charles A., 1983. Sports announcer talk: syntactic aspects of register variation. Language in Society 12, 153172.
Kuiper, Koenraad, 1996. Smooth Talkers: The Linguistic Performance of Auctioneers and Sportscasters. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.
Rosenbaum, Dieter, 1978. Gesprochen: Einwort-Satze im Aktionstext. In: Hackforth, Josef, Weischenberg, Siegfried (Eds.), Sport und
Massenmedien. Limpert, Bad Homburg, pp. 142157.
Tomlin, Russell S., 1997. Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: the role of attention in grammar. In: Nuyts, J., Pederson,
E. (Eds.), Language and Conceptualization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 162189.
Tomlin, Russell S., et al., 1998. Discourse semantics. In: van Dijk, T. (Ed.), Discourse as Structure and Process. Discourse Studies: A
Multidisciplinary Introduction, vol. 1. Sage, London, pp. 63111.

1858

Book review

Williams, Christopher, 2002. Non-progressive aspect in English in commentaries and demonstrations using the present tense. Journal of Pragmatics
34, 12351256.
Jan Chovanec is assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech
Republic, where he completed his doctoral thesis (2001) on the interpersonal aspects of news in English. He has published in linguistic journals
(e.g. Discourse & Communication) and volumes (e.g. The Linguistics of Football; Language and the Law: International Outlooks). His research
interests include the interactive nature of discourse in media contexts, the representation of social actors, and word play. He has recently focused on
the language of live text commentary. He is the editor-in-chief of Brno Studies in English.

Jan Chovanec
Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts,
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
E-mail address: chovanec@phil.muni.cz