Konstanze Jungbluth (Tübingen/Erfurt)

Konstanze Jungbluth (Tübingen/Erfurt)
Tübingen, 25.1.2003

Football Games on TV and Radio.
Observing Word Order Phenomena in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese (and German)

The empirical approach to word order phenomena starts with the data collected in the Corpus BraToLi (www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/tusnelda.html). The authentic and homogenous corpus containing transcriptions of football games (Argentina, Spain, Brazil) allows cross-linguistic insights. German football game transcriptions have also been added to these (Jürgens 1999). While verb-second-patterns are dominant in written varieties of all three languages, verb-first-patterns are more likely to be used in discourse. In German these V1 sentences do not form part of the written standard, while in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, these patterns are more widespread. The contrast between V2 and V1 patterns is further developed when looking at SVO, DEIKT VO, VSO and VOS patterns. Spanish has the most word order patterns (WOP), while WOPs in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are fewer and in German the fewest, e.g. word order is fixed to a greater degree. The very frequent case of verbless utterances in all three sub-corpora can also be observed. Interestingly, the patterns vary along the scala between written and spoken varieties in the same way, which may be considered as universal. While V2 patterns are relatively complete and thus optimal for written usage, V1 patterns need more context and VZERO patterns can only be used in cases, where visual and linguistic information is combined into one communicative message. Constraints on the use on these patterns in written and spoken varieties are language specific. What is regular in syntax may be used infrequently and what has to be considered extraregular, looking at syntax, is used extensively by the speakers in discourse, at least when they are commenting on football games in any of the mentioned countries.

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