The role of context in coaches’ post-match discourses
The role of context in coaches’ post-match discourses

Summary/Abstract: Nowadays, when there are liquid boundaries between sports and other social areas of life in terms of values, communication or behaviour models, analysing the impact of social context upon sport actors’ discourses could provide interesting insights regarding the socially situated nature of discourses. The focus of this study case is on the impact that the context has upon coaches’ public discourses and, moreover, on how they define and position themselves towards other sports’ actors. Based on a corpus of coaches’ discourses during the post-match press conferences from an international handball competition, there are two main dimensions of analysis: the contractual/situational one and the relational one. While, the compelling force of the communication contract of press conferences determines a high level of similarity between coaches’ discourses, the sport courtesy speech acts work both as a way of establishing a consensual frame of interaction between the participants, as well as a way of building and maintaining a positive face for the speaker and his team.

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