Introduction
Artistic gymnastics has been a part of the summer Olympic Games since they began in 1896; it has seen a major increase in popularity in recent years, especially in the UK due the success of the Great British team at the London 2012 Olympics where we won one silver and three bronze medals. There was a 99% take up of the tickets for the artistic gymnastics as people watched one of the nations most popular sports. At 2.98m from the ground and 2.40m across the high bar event has always been an exciting part of this. Scores are made up of a difficulty score based on the moves performed and connections between them added to an execution score out of ten based on how well they perform …show more content…
It was at the 2012 Olympics in London that I first came to watch the sport and I have followed it almost religiously since, watching every World and European championship even cancelling plans to watch the commonwealth games in 2014. When I thought about this question and considered what I already knew about the commentary style just from watching previous events and have then found these features as I 've analysed my data. When looking for theories I found, as I expected, there had been a large amount of analysis of football games. There has been much uncovered about sports commentary and I wanted to see if theories such as David Crystals colour adding was true for individual sports as well as the team sports from which it was derived.
I chose my question "How is language used in gymnastics commentary?" with the fact that I knew very little about what I was going to discover in mind. It gave me the scope to look choose from a large amount of available data and find as much as I could from it. I chose to look at the Men 's high bar final from the 2014 world championships as I remember it being one of my particular favourite apparatus from the event last year. I will look at lexis, grammar, discourse and spoken language which will hopefully allow me to answer my question in plenty of …show more content…
The use of these adjectives emphasises the nature of the championships creating a real sense of competition between the gymnasts. This also gives people who may not have watched gymnastics before a good measure by which to compare they gymnasts without having to rely on the scores. For example "cleanest" in the context of the routine indicates to the audience that the routine in question was one of the most precise and well performed without having to say as much. This is good as it allows for a wider range of understanding within the