Zwischen Sachlichkeit und Euphorie: Prosodische Gestaltung im Sportkommentar am Beispiel eines Olympiasiegs im Schwimmen
Between Objectivity and Euphoria: Prosodic Structure in Sports Commentary on an Olympic Victory in Swimming)

Summary/Abstract: Prosodic features play a central role in the production and reception of spoken language, as they serve both to structure information and to convey emotions. This duality becomes particularly evident in sports commentary, where commentators combine factual information with the creation of excitement and engagement. This paper examines this phenomenon using the German live commentary of Lukas Märtens’ Olympic victory in the 400-meter freestyle at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games – the first Olympic gold medal by a German pool swimmer since 1988. The study analyzes the informative and expressive functions of the prosodic features through acoustic-auditory parameters such as fundamental frequency/pitch, standard deviation of fundamental frequency, intensity/volume, speech rate, focus accents, and pauses. The study is based on an auditory analysis conducted using the software EXMARaLDA (Schmidt/Wörner 2014). To visualize and objectify the observations, the auditory data are supplemented with acoustic measurements obtained from Praat (Boersma/Weenink 2025). The analysis shows that prosodic variations closely follow the dynamics of the race. While factual-informative functions dominate at the beginning, pitch, modulation, loudness, and focus accents gradually increase expressivity as the race progresses, culminating at its peak. Extralinguistic factors, particularly historical and emotional contexts, additionally influence prosodic shaping. This confirms that prosody goes far beyond mere information transfer and plays a crucial role in the staging of sporting events, which should be further explored in future studies with regard to a possible “sports prosody”.

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