THE DOMINANT “PARTICIPANTS” COMPONENT IN THE COGNITIVE MODEL OF A SPORTING EVENT

The paper focuses on the comparative analysis of the methods of linguistic representation of the dominant constituent “Participants” which is a part of a sporting event cognitive model. The fragments of the English discourse covering football, tennis and rugby matches in the form of match reviews were analyzed. The authors applied the methods of critical discourse analysis, semantic and quantitative analysis as well as the classification method in the framework of content analysis. In order to prove the dominant character of the analyzed situation component the notion of nominative density (the variation in linguistic representation) was used. The conducted research demonstrates the dominant character of the constituent “Participants”; different methods of the representation of a sports event participants are singled out, including the use of the full name of the team, its reduced version and team`s nickname, references to coach`s or manager`s name in a possessive case, the use of lexical units with generalizing meaning such as team, pack and words with the connotation “locals-strangers” (homeside, visitors, etc.), the mention of individual players` names, their function in the team and some additional characteristics (for instance, experience, achievements, age, nationality). Each of the representation methods listed is illustrated with the relevant examples. The comparative analysis demonstrated that discoursive fragments taken from the sphere of football and rugby possess a large number of common features in the representation of the analyzed constituent of a cognitive model, which mostly emphasize the team`s essence as a whole, while in the discoursive fragments related to tennis the sportsperson`s personality with all their characteristics gains greater significance.