“Reporting or Interpreting?”—A Discoursal Study of Broadcasts on NBA Games in China

Abstract

From the perspective of empirical discourse analysis, this paper identifies the site broadcasters’ roles and cognitive blending process in NBA (National Basketball Association) broadcasts in China. The authors find that NBA broadcasters chiefly interpret the information they have obtained from sports sites and interviews with the coaches and players, employing various interpreting strategies, such as commentary, amplification, supplementation and restructure. Cognitively, the language that NBA broadcasters applied reveals their cognitive blending process of interpreting techniques, strategies, sports knowledge and attitudes towards the games, of who take up different roles to fulfill different communicating purposes, all of which project various cognitions on NBA games. Despite the fact that one role might make certain linguistic behaviors prevail over the others, especially their interpreting role, NBA site broadcasters coordinate it with other roles properly through which they present different levels of translational and constructional schematicity, thus yielding a coherent and constructional working mode of NBA broadcasting practice in China.