An Innovative Analysis Of Olympic Opening Ceremony Comment

The Olympic opening ceremony which contains significant cultural meaning is an important carrier of the Olympic spirit. It is not only a sport event, but also a social event. For the state media CCTV, the Olympic opening ceremony commentary has always played a vital role in the whole game.CCTV started the live broadcast of the Olympic opening ceremony since 1984. From 1984 to 2008, commentators had used the traditional poetical speech to comment the Olympic opening ceremony, with splendid magnificent phrases and sentences and without any colloquial language. This commentary style had attracted and influenced a great quantity of people in that specific period, but it was also identified by audiences that it had been prepared ahead of time. The commentaries of each Olympic opening ceremonies had many similarities, far from our daily spoken language, lacking unique characters and interactions with audiences, so the comment style is no longer adapted to our time.In 2012, CCTV had made significant changes for the commentary of the London Olympic opening ceremony. It was the first time two different channels used two different versions to comment the opening ceremony: Zhang Bin and Sha Tong cooperated to comment for the Olympic channel with the conversation style while Bai Yansong commented for the news channel with his interpretation of the ceremony as a piece of news. It was a big leap and brave try.This thesis tries to initially summarize the general features of the Olympic opening ceremony commentaries which are complimentary and athletic, according to the commentaries of all previous years. These commentaries are adhered to the topic and the style of the Olympic opening ceremony, trying to eulogize the Olympic Games, and introduce knowledge about sport. Secondly, this thesis briefly analyzes the characteristics of the Olympic opening ceremonies commentaries before 2012. Thirdly, the writer establishes the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony commentary texts as the research object, using knowledge of journalism and corpus linguistics, research method of content analysis, expert interview and discourse analysis to analyze the commentaries in-depth. From the micro level, representative examples are chosen to analyze the two unique commentary styles, including their formats and details. On the other hand, from the macro level, the perspective of language environment is adapted to analyze the driving factors behind this innovation, including social background, media and live broadcast environment. This thesis aims at filling the vulnerable spot of the research of large-scale athletic opening ceremonies’languages. In the new media era, this thesis also tries to provide some new enlightenment for the future Olympic opening ceremony comments on television and better approaches to satisfy the audiences during the TV live broadcast.