‘What do you do with a ball in soccer?’– medium, mode, and pluricentricity in succer reporting1

ABSTRACT: Variation studies on Englishes are slowly shifting towards the investigation of contextual parameters as avenues of pluricentric development. The role of media languages, in particular across media types and outlets, is often overlooked. This paper combines contextual parameters with media language studies. The focus is on only one segment: the sports domain, in the print and broadcast media in British, Indian and Ghanaian English. Exploiting ICE's design and text retrieval features and adding Ghanaian samples, we assembled a small-scale special purpose corpus of reporting/commenting texts. We looked at the link between the sports register and the reported (= media) version, descriptions of actions and their spatio-temporal coordinates, linguistic creativity, mode, and variety-specific features. Our findings confirm that media are a considerable differentiating factor. The reporting of completed or of ongoing events turns out to result in quite distinct discourses. The press reconstructs a past event at a higher level of abstraction and evaluation than broadcast media's moment-by-moment commenting mode. Mode and pluricentricity were not found to be strong independent variables.