Incremental Functional Grammar and the language of football commentary
John Lachlan Mackenzie · Pragmatics & beyond. New series · 2005
The article investigates the notion that the grammatical characteristics of spoken utterances vary with the time pressure under which they are produced. Within the framework of my Incremental Functional Grammar, which takes acts of utterance to consist of one or more sequentially produced subacts (i.e. actions of predication or of reference), the hypothesis arises that a TV football commentary will display different degrees of grammatical complexity according to the amount of time pressure felt by the speaker at different points in the broadcast. I take time pressure to correlate with various subgenres of the commentary. The results confirm the hypothesis but also reveal the role of formulaicity and time-conditioned limited consultation of the semantic and structural modules of the grammar.