Topic Construction In Live Sports Commentary

The present study aims to advance our understanding of the notion of 'discourse topic' in connection with the discourse of live Chinese Badminton Commentary (henceforth CBC). As a kind of Sports Announcer Talk (short for SAT), CBC has not been touched upon from the point of view of discourse analysis. We are interested in the topic construction in this kind of genre.The research aims to find out how a discourse topic can be identified in a significant sports commentary and what rules are underlying topic construction in such natural discourses as CBC. First of all, we collected some video recordings of the semi-finals and finals of Tomas Cup 2006 relayed by CCTV5 and transcribed verbatim the commentaries of four games to establish a database. The database contains more than one and a half hour's transcripts with about 20,000 Chinese characters. Although it is not a large corpus, its focused and typical content facilitates our effort to get insight into discourse topic and topic construction. Based on the existing theories about discourse topic and linguistic features of SAT, we conducted two investigations. The first investigation is concentrated on how to identify the discourse topic in a live sports commentary. It involves the demarcation of topic units and the categorization of topics in CBC. Many topic boundary markers such as discourse markers can be used to segment two independent topics while the speaker's topic entity and topical chain can indicate the oneness of a topic unit. In regarding to our research purpose, topics of CBC can be classified in three ways: usual topics vs. occasional topics, nuclear topics vs. extended topics and hot topics vs common topics. These three categories show us the frequency, the words and the depth of discussion about the topic. Through these characteristics, we may spot out the discourse topic, that is, the central topic of a sports commentary. To test the efficiency of this method, we conducted a survey among 53 college students to extract what is left in their mind immediately after watching the game. The results show that more than half of the subjects recalled the same topic as we selected by analysis. Thus we gain some ground o say that the categorization helps identify the discourse topic. Furthermore, it can be seen that the subjects' knowledge and opinion about the discourse topic are affected by the commentaries to some degree.In order to better understand how discourse topic appears and develops in the process of commentators' talk, we carried out the second investigation: topic construction. When we look inside the interior of the topic units, we find some ways of topic introduction, which updates our ideas about the general and special functions of topic boundary markers. Then we analyzed the rules of topic development in the body of topic units from the view of pragmatic functions. We detected some typical models in our data, mainly these three: N+EX+EV, EV+EX+EV and N+EV (N: Narration, EX: Explanation and EV: Evaluation). On this basis, we saw the difference between the discourse topic and a common topic in topic construction, which leads to the varied recognition about different topics in the audience's mind.To conclude from the findings of the above two investigations, discourse topic of CBC, as of other SATs, comes into being during the process of commentaries. Through examining the frequency, length and depth of discussion of various topics, we can identify the discourse topic. Also it can be distinguished from common topics out of its special construction forms.