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Children's competence in the specialized register of sportscasting*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Susan M. Hoyle
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Abstract

This study reports on four school-age boys' use of the specialized register of sportscasting as performed both spontaneously and when elicited by the researcher, and compares the boys' production of formal register-marking features to adult usage. Like the commentary of professional sportscasters, the boys' commentating is characterized by heavy use of simple-present action verbs, use of constructions lacking elements that are ordinarily grammatically required (the subject pronoun he, an auxiliary verb, or a main verb), and (in the elicited version) frequent occurrence of passives. The boys invest the most ‘ungram-matical’ utterance types (those lacking finite verbs) with a function that is not clearly present in adult sportscasting discourse, that of pointing forward in the discourse.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 435 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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Footnotes

*

Thanks go to Deborah Tannen, Peter Lowenberg, and especially Deborah Schiffrin for encouragement and many comments on the dissertation from which this paper in part derives.

References

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