Infotainment and the Construction of a Community in Sport-News

The community of sport expresses aggression, competition and solidarity when consuming or (re)producing social events and identity (gender, ethnicity, sexuality) plays an important role (Kassing et al., 2004) in the construction of a community (Magnane, 1964; Colovic, 1999). This paper presents a case study of two online sport commentaries that have been analysed in order to explore the ways in which identity is constructed and communicated within these two epistemic communities and to both identify and verify which linguistic strategies are used by the epistemic communities in order to support (their claims to) objective knowledge. Cross-cultural comparisons can be made in relation to conventions for expressing stances that link linguistic behaviours to the construction of particular social identities. Starting from the connection between transitivity and modality in the construction of identities, the paper attempts to verify whether or not the narrative and linguistic strategies performed by the two different cultural communities are the same and, if so, what is central in their construction of reality.