Sport as the Essential Social Construct and Equally Essential Language of Sport

The article deals with the influence English has in sports discourse and explores the interaction between sports and language (English in particular). Considering the characteristics of the sport language as a whole, the paper highlights both the linguistic description and the influence that emphasis has on the genre. On this account, two aspects are underlined: the language of sports and its special features (lexical items and sentence structures) and the rhetorical strategies in sports communication (used to entertain or to express emotion). The aim is to underline to what extent the language of sports is labeled as “special language” on the one hand and how attitude is expressed and considered a peculiarity of this language, revealing the linguistic forms by which groups identify themselves. In conclusion, the paper confirms that the language of sports does have special features, having its own framework, and should get more interest from linguistic studies, above all for what concerns genre analysis and sociological studies.