'I'm on the Way Back from the Game': A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study Comparing Pronoun Use in the Football Phone-In '606'

In this corpus-assisted discourse study, the linguistic environments of pronouns are analysed and compared in calls to the BBC Radio 5 Live football phone-in ‘606’. Phone-ins are ripe for research, as they allow laypeople to debate with professionals to a large audience. This paper examines a 75,000-word corpus of British English football phone-in data to compare pronoun use between callers whose teams won and lost and establishes the themes they construct. Collocation and concordance corpus tools are utilised, allowing for a comparative analysis of 112 transcribed calls, not only comparing usage between pronouns themselves, but also how they are used differently by supporters whose teams won or lost. Collocation results show that the pronouns ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, and ‘they’ are used in constructions that fit into six linguistic and thematic categories. The additional context provided by the concordance analysis shows that these can be simplified into just two purposes: constructing stance and building credibility. There is little difference in how credibility is invoked between the callers whose teams won or lost, but as expected, the losers employ a more negative stance towards their situation. The stance constructions incorporate a variety of pronouns, whilst credibility is primarily built through first person pronouns. I argue that stance is a principal element of calls in programmes where views on a subject are given. Credibility is also paramount, because the callers’ stances can only be taken seriously when they state their credentials to prove they can comment on the topic as an expert.