Examining the Role of Linguistic Register to Analyses Discourse on Sports: Case to Visualize Chatting on Facebook by Pakistani Supporters of Cricket Match

Abstract

Study focused to investigate the use of specific lexical items to comment on sports in social media applications. For this, the application of Facebook was taken to observe comments of Pakistani cricket supporters. The study is designed to first identify, then discuss actual and situational meanings of semantic structures that have been solely employed for cricket matches. It was possible with the adoption of the model of analyzing the semantics of lexis given by Geeraert’s (2009). The project is designed on descriptive (survey). Corpus from the commentary section on Facebook was taken that comprised 4 chats on Facebook and (24) chats on sub-pages of Facebook. They were all coded from 1-24 as (C1 to C-24). The following chats have been carefully extracted to fulfill the purpose of the study in the platform groups of Facebook. They were visualized under principles to find the semantics of lexis through the proposed model (2009) of Geeraert. The findings of the project revealed that Pakistani supporters of Cricket have employed peculiar words and structures that verified specific interactions in the sports domain. Following phrases and words were possible to get interpreted with defined context. This has been concluded in the present study that chats on the Facebook application by Pakistani supporters of cricket have used the majority of sentences that were aligned to sports’ register and could only be understood as well employed by fans of cricket. This contribution tends to suggest in the end that following the framework of the following study, many studies on the relationship of sports with the use of language can be presented by research scholars in the future from different parts of the World with the employment of theory on the register of language by Halliday (1978).