NBA即席解说词的功能文体学研究

A Functional Stylistic Approach to the Study of

Impromptu NBA Commentaries

NBA即席解说词的功能文体学研究

A Dissertation Submitted to

the Graduate School of Henan University

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

By

Gaojinmiao

Supervisor: Prof. Zhang Ke

March, 2013

Acknowledgements

I am truly grateful to all those people who have been instrumental in bringing this thesis to fruition. Without all sorts of invaluable encourage, guidance and support, I could not have successfully accomplished it.

First of all, I would like to present my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Zhang Ke, whose patient instructions, painstaking efforts, enlightening guidance and constant encouragement have contributed immensely to the completion of this thesis. Her valuable advice and direction have drawn my attention to a number of deficiencies for improvement and have made many things clearer for me. The most precious treasure I gained from her is the precision in doing research, which I believe will continue to benefit me in my future research.

Secondly, I feel deeply indebted to all those teachers who have instructed and enlightened me during my post-graduate studies in the School of Foreign Languages, Henan University.

I also owe my friends, who have shared my happiness and frustrations during this research.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their support and encouragement.

Abstract

NBA, as the biggest National Basketball Association in the United States, is drawing attention from all over the world. Impromptu NBA commentary is as interesting, vivid and wonderful as the game itself, and it is very different from other spoken varieties such as news, speech and so on. However, at present, a comprehensive and in-depth study of this variety from the functional perspective has not been well attempted. Based on a synthetical mode for foregrounding feature analysis, this thesis just offers a functional-stylistic approach to impromptu NBA commentary.

This study recognizes that language is constructed and also exists in the social reality. The formation of the discourse is restricted by context of situation and social functions. The social function of impromptu NBA commentary is to report the important information of the competition in a quick, objective and not boring way, which determines the linguistic features of the discourse.

Based on the five videos downloaded from the NBA official website, the present thesis adopts both the qualitative and quantitative approaches and analyzes the foregrounding features of impromptu NBA commentary at the phonological, lexical, grammatical and semantic levels.

This paper employs the top-down method, gives an analysis of the context of situation of impromptu NBA commentary first, then put forward the social functions and then summarizes the macroscopical linguistic features of this discourse: vividness, concisity, objectivity, rapidity, precisity, simplicity, clarity, action-packedness and looseness. In terms of the macroscopical linguistic features, this paper makes a detailed analysis about how they are realized at the four levels through the two foregrounding devices —deflection and incongruity.

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