A comparison of the broadcasting format and the English and German language use in televised live commentaries in NFL broadcasts in the season 2016/17

The Aim of this thesis was to find out about the similarities and differences within the American and German broadcasts of American football, more specifically of its set-up and specifically the commentary language. In order to answer these questions a theoretical framework for the analysis of a sports broadcasting program and the sports announcers talk regarding verb tenses and register is presented. The present tenses and the past tenses play an important role in sportscasting. The register is divided into a short key register vocabulary I pre-elected and compared its use within both languages, and all the heavy modifiers, I identified and made a cross-language comparison through the chosen games. The collected data is from four chosen games of the 2016/17 season of the NFL. The analyzed data had to be evaluated with the background of the history of the sports broadcast within the two areas so that an answer to the research questions could have been concluded. I discovered that although the set-ups of the broadcasts were very similar to one another, only with some minor changes, there was a difference in the commentators’ use of language. The broadcasts in English showed a much broader variation of vocabulary use than in its counterpart in Germany, which is a result of a longer existence of the program and due to the fact that the native football language is English.
Keywords: heavy modifier; register; sports announcer talk; target audience; verb tensesKey register vocabulary: catch, down, flag, line of scrimmage, sack, tackle