Children's competence in the specialized register of sportscasting.
This study reports on four school-age boys' use of the specialized register of sportscasting as performed both spontaneously and when elicited by the researcher, and compares the boys' production of formal register-marking features to adult usage. Like the commentary of professional sportscasters, the boys' commentating is characterized by heavy use of simple-present action verbs, use of constructions lacking elements that are ordinarily grammatically required (the subject pronoun he, an auxiliary verb, or a main verb), and (in the elicited version) frequent occurrence of passives. The boys invest the most 'ungrammatical' utterance types (those lacking finite verbs) with a function that is not clearly present in adult sportscasting discourse, that of pointing forward in the discourse.
Hoyle
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D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013177:Sports; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary