Temporal Arrangements and Humanistic Narrative in Live Sports Commentary
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/e16ahr74Keywords:
Live Sports Commentary, Temporal Arrangements, Humanistic Narrative, Table Tennis Broadcasting, Replay Talk, Sports DiscourseAbstract
Live sports commentary is both a limited-time event and a narrative. Following Xia Luobin's study of intervention timing in table tennis commentary, this paper investigates how the organisation of time affects the production of humanistic discourse in live sports broadcasting. Time should not be regarded merely as a technical parameter for operating; rather, at the level of entry points, pauses, replay windows, score-based emphasis and the transition from exposition to interpretation, there are all kinds of means to present commentary in a more accessible way for the audience. Collect research on live commentary, replay talk, media sports discourse and sports communication to discuss case studies of Xia's table tennis commentary. It presents a three-stage model of the action time: action time, transition time and reflection time; each stage can support a different type of humanistic expression, such as tactical empathy, athlete characterization and emotional orientation, or value narration. Therefore, the paper believes that time is a necessary condition for high-quality live commentary and proposes an application path to improve contemporary sports broadcasting in a fast-paced competitive environment.
Downloads
References
[1] Scannell, P. (1996). Radio, television and modern life: A phenomenological approach. Blackwell.
[2] Marriott, S. (1996). Time and time again: "Live" television commentary and the construction of replay talk. Media, Culture & Society, 18(1), 69–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344396018001005
[3] Tolson, A. (2006). Media talk: Spoken discourse on TV and radio. Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/j.ctt1g09vbv
[4] Gerhardt, C. (2008). Turn-by-turn and move-by-move: A multi-modal analysis of live TV football commentary. In E. Lavric, G. Pisek, A. Skinner, & W. Stadler (Eds.), The linguistics of football (pp. 283–294). Gunter Narr.
[5] Billings, A. C., Butterworth, M. L., & Turman, P. D. (2014). Communication and sport: Surveying the field (2nd ed.). SAGE.
[6] Chovanec, J. (2018). The discourse of online sportscasting: Constructing meaning and interaction in live text commentary. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.297
[7] Jucker, A. H. (2010). "Audacious, brilliant!! What a strike!" Live text commentaries on the Internet as real-time narratives. In C. R. Hoffmann (Ed.), Narrative revisited: Telling a story in the age of new media (pp. 57–78). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.199.05juc
[8] Rowe, D. (2004). Sport, culture and the media: The unruly trinity (2nd ed.). Open University Press.
[9] Lewandowski, M. (2012). The language of online sports commentary in a comparative perspective. Lingua Posnaniensis, 54(1), 65–76. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10122-012-0006-0
[10] Hutchins, B., & Rowe, D. (2012). Sport beyond television: The Internet, digital media and the rise of networked media sport. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203120415
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 International Journal of Education and Humanities
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
