Authors

In the modern world, sport is considered to be one of the most important spheres of human activity. Sport is constantly developing, new kinds of sports are emerging, and, as a result, new names, terms, phrases, idioms appear and enrich the lexical vocabulary of the language.

Sports discourse is characterized by undeniable originality and consists of three components: professional and terminological communication of specialists, the description of sporting events in the media and the jargon of fans. With the development of information technology, the language of sports takes on its electronic form: discussions are held in chat rooms and forums, sports events are critically reflected on and analyzed. A new branch of linguistics is emerging –   Internet linguistics, the subject of research of which is Internet communication, which is becoming one of the most common forms of communication due to its interactivity, presence effect, and also information richness.

The article is devoted to the study of the stylistic features of the Spanish football minute-by-minute on-line commentary. The definition of this kind of commentary is given. The stylistic features of this type of commentary are explored: an analysis of the tropes and figures of speech used in it is carried out. Tropes and figures of speech are distinguished from a variety of stylistic devices. Actually tropes are tools which involve the deviation from the expected and literal meaning of words. Figures of speech involve a deviation from the typical mechanics of a sentence. The article also provides a brief analytical review of works devoted to the study of sports commentary and on-line sports commentary as a special genre of sports discourse.

Football reports are considered to be the main dynamic form of Spanish sports discourse that has a strong identity through a rich tradition that reflects a nationwide interest in football. Among the different means of speech that are widely used by sports commentators with the purpose of eliciting the influence on the recipient (an ordinary reader, fan or professional) a metaphor as a universal technique, deserves special attention, as it reveals the peculiarities of the national mentality of the society, its perception of the surrounding reality. The purpose of the article is to analyze, from the point of view of the national and universal vision of the world, the basic metaphors of the sports discourse prevailing in football reports (2019–2021) in Spanish. The material for the study is the online versions of the leading print sports publications of Spain (“Marca”, “As” (Madrid), “Mundo Deportivo”, “Sport” (Barcelona), as well as the sites www.rtve.es, www.laliga.com. The study presents the main universal spheres – the sources of basic metaphors in the genre of modern Spanish football reports in the projection on the realities of the national mentality.