Linguistics of Baseball #2

Charles Ferguson is famous for coining the term "diglossia," a central concept in sociolinguistics, in his often quoted (but rarely read) 1959 article.  [Shamless Plug: For more information on Diglossia check out the December 2010 issue of Popular Anthropology Magazine]. 

In addition to being a scholar of African and Asian languages and a keen observer of the ways in which language and society intersect, Chuck must have been a baseball fan as well.  He may have been the first researcher to examine the linguistic features of a play-by-play announcer.

In a 1983 paper "Sports Announcer Talk," Ferguson turns his attention to teh speech of baseball announcers:

Since most of [Sports announcer talk] is not explicitly taught but is picked up in an unplanned, "natural" manner research would probably show regularities of the type reported in other registers and routines.

In other words, the speech of baseball announcers is "learned" in much the same way as other varieties of English- by generalizing rules from and imitating routines in other people's speech.  Ferguson then goes on to note several features of this particular variety of the English language that are not found in others:

1. Deletions: A word, usually a pronoun or the verb "to be" is omitted, as in "Joey Votto [is] taking a big lead at first."

2. Inversions: The usual word order of a sentence is reversed, as in "Taking a big lead at first base is Votto."

3. Result Expressions: The use of the words "for" or "to" to connect an event and the result, as in "Arroyo throws a curve ball for strike three to end the inning."

4. Heavy Modifiers: More commonly found in written English, "heavy" modifiers are long descriptions of a player inserted in the middle of a sentence, as in "Scott Rolan, who struck out in the first and hit a two-run double in the fifth, steps up to bat."

5. Tense Usage: Is probably a feature of English verbs in general. The simple present is used to report events taking place at the moment of speaking and the present progressive for events of longer duration, "Brandon Philips throws to Votto for the out," versus "Jay Bruce is batting .238 for the season."

6. Count terminology: Is the convention used to describe balls and strikes.  "Three and one" always means "three balls and one strike" and never the other way around. Japanese announcers, according to Ferguson, reverse the order, with the number of strikes first and the number of balls second.

My favorite part of this paper is the syntactic "wiggle room" in English that Sports Announcer Talk shows us.  Some of the features are a fairly extreme deviation from "normal" English, and yet seasoned baseball fans have no trouble imagining the action on the field as it is described.

Ferguson ends his paper with a fascinating challenge that, to my knowledge, has yet to be accepted.  Sports Announcer Talk presents a wonderful opportunity for historical study, since the recording of games from the 1920's are available.  How has this variety of English changed over the last (almost) 100 years?  Have "dialects" emerged or merged as sports announcers emulate earlier generations or move from one market to another?

Further Reading: Ferguson, Charles A. 1983. "Sports announcer talk: Syntactic aspects of register variation." Language in Society Vol. 12, No. 2: 153-17. [Found here, if you have access to JSTOR]