Hammering or thump win?

Frame semantic analyses of perspectivation in football match reports

Abstract

This article examines perspectivisation as a central means of biased football reporting on the websites of individual football clubs in the German Bundesliga from a frame-semantic perspective. Based on a corpus of 582 football match reports, each with two texts on the same match from two different perspectives, it is shown how and with which linguistic means the course of the match and individual scenes are framed differently on the websites of the winning and losing teams. Quantitative methods such as keyword analysis and automated frame-semantic annotation as well as qualitative methods are used to show that different framings of the same events and scenes enable different evaluations. Since football match reports must express the football knowledge of the authors, this knowledge consists not least of the ability to convey coherent evaluations in a way that is appropriate for the target group of biased football audiences.