L’imitation de la conversation en tant que strategie de connivence dans le discours journalistique sportif

Abstract

Creating and maintaining an imaginary bond between the journalist and readers is a communicational strategy of the written sports news discourse. Since news discourse is monologal, it has specific communicational constraints that it seeks to overcome, and the lack of direct contact between the authors and their readers is a key hurdle to cross. Additionally, sport has a notable cohesive function, and as such produces a sense of a sports community even when taken as a news subject. The imaginary bond is therefore a strategy for overcoming the discursive gap between the journalist and their readers, while at the same time reinforcing the impression of community that the subject of sports draws on. In the sports news discourse this strategy is translated through different linguistic means, such as conversational elements. Based on selected articles from the French written sports news, a qualitative analysis of texts enabled us to observe the linguistic means through which the imitation of conversation contributes to the discursive strategy of bonding. The analysis is focused on informal and interactive conversational features. It shows that such conversationalization is particularly apparent in the informal character of the discourse on the lexical and discursive levels. This adds to the seeming informality of the communicational situation, and therefore to the readers’ sense of an imaginary sports community. On the syntactic level this is reinforced by interactional elements such as rhetorical questions and other interrogatives that address the reader as an interlocutor and echo the dynamics of a dialogue. Both conversational aspects, as used in the French sports news discourse, contribute to a sense of informal atmosphere and community bond among sports enthusiasts.

Keywords

• sport
• discourse
• strategies
• imaginary bond
• conversationalization