Stylistic Interpretation of English Football Vocabulary Itemsand Set Expressions in Publicistic Discourse

The paper dwells upon the study of English football vocabulary items and set expressions from the stylistic point of view. We applied Galperin´s model of stylistic analysis in our research,therefore football expressions and phrases are evaluated in terms of their stylistic significance at the phonetic-phonological, lexical and syntactical levels. The linguistic corpus of research material of 670 excerpts comes from printed and online British media, namely the Guardian and its websites. In initial chapters, the paper outlines the past and present of football on the British Isles. As football vocabulary items and set expressions are used by sports journalists and reporters too, we present a concise diachronic and synchronic view of the British sports journalism as the sub-style of publicistic style. The core of the paper is focused on quantitative and qualitative stylistic analysis of the corpus. Furthermore,the corpus of the language material has been analysed according to the football activities related to the most popular sport worldwide. Our research revealed that the scope of the most frequent stylistic devices included in the English football vocabulary has been mainly focused on the lexical level (namely metonymy, metaphor, hyperbole and periphrasis). The results provide some interesting insights into the two-fold application of meaning (primary and transferred/contextual meaning) in the analysed expressions.