European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences EpSBS www.europeanproceedings.com e-ISSN: 2357-1330 DOI: 10.15405/epsbs.2020.11.03.120 DCCD 2020 Dialogue of Cultures - Culture of Dialogue: from Conflicting to Understanding REALIZATION OF THE “FOOTBALL MATCH” COGNITIVE MODEL IN THE SPORTS INTERNET DISCOURSE Viacheslav D. Shevchenko (a), Anastasiya G. Pisareva (b)* *Corresponding author (a) Samara National Research University, Samara, Russian Federation, [email protected] (b) Samara National Research University, 443086, 34, Moskovskoye shosse, Samara, Russian Federation, [email protected] Abstract The present paper is devoted to the cognitive model of a socially significant event in the sphere of sport, which is a football match. The undertaken research is determined by the fact that sport nowadays has been widely mediated, it also plays a significant part in life of society. The discursive fragments in the form of match reports subjected to analysis were collected from the News section of the official web-sites of the British football clubs; each of them covers the fixtures of 2020 football season. The article provides the analysis of the constituents of the cognitive model (such as “PARTICIPANTS”, “TIME”, “LOCATION”, “OBJECTIVES”, etc.) at different levels, which is aimed at identifying the dominant model components. The study was carried out by means of content analysis and critical discourse analysis. Two levels at which the research was conducted are the macro- and the micro-level. They were singled out depending on the journalist’s pragmatic goals, which may be the focused on a match and a team as a whole or characterize the action happening directly on the pitch. The findings demonstrate that the dominant components of the model may differ according to the level they represent and the value of the given component for understanding the essence of the event; nevertheless, such constituents as “PARTICIPANTS” and “RESULTS” turned out to be of equal importance on both levels. 2357-1330 © 2020 Published by European Publisher. Keywords: Cognitive model, sports Internet discourse, event. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2020.11.03.120 Corresponding Author: Anastasiya G. Pisareva Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference eISSN: 2357-1330 1. Introduction Nowadays sporting events represent an integral part of social life. Sport used to be seen as mere entertainment, however, it is no longer so. It is studied by a variety of academic disciplines and a vivid example of one is sociology of sport which comprises “sociological studies of different types of sports and their internal relations” and still develops its theoretical and methodological footing (Hovden, 2015, pp. 480-481). Sport now influences both culture and society on multiple levels and intersects with other powerful cultural discourses. Given that power and power relations are organised and institutionalised (van Dijk, 1993), exploring sports discourse is important in its own right. Thus, we believe it is necessary to analyse discursive processes in the sporting world as well as peculiarities of interaction and meaning making in sport, of sport and about sport. Sport today has become mediated and new technologies influenced the development of cultural configuration comprised by sport and media. Sport organizations have developed a global consciousness, and commonly utilized improved technology to reach fans, broadcast events, become active participants in the sports discourse, and sell merchandise, tickets, life experiences, and spectacle (Smith & Stewart, 2015). Scholars have started to talk about “mediatization in sport” which has become especially prominent in the last decade (Caldwell, 2020). Hepp et al. (2015) states that the subject of mediatization is “the interrelation between the change of media and communication, on the one hand, and the change of (fields of) culture and society, on the other hand” (p. 319). It also makes possible to analyze sports discourse from the perspective of inter-language comparison of news articles by considering not only linguistic and cognitive- communicative aspects but also a linguocultural one (Gavryushina, 2016). Media, especially the social one, is integrated into our life and interaction with sport. Media itself influences the language of sports discourse by giving it, for instance, huge expressive potential able to intensify the impact of a media item (Prom et al., 2017). Major sporting events always get their coverage through various means and it provides a great terrain for social linguistic research. The communicative processes connected to them are realized in sports discourse which is widely represented on the Internet. We are going to analyze the actual instances of sports discourse which may be interpreted as language-in- use in the context of sport. The present study deals with a notion of a cognitive model. Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch (1983) represent a cognitive model as a specific kind of structural organization of knowledge in our memory. During comprehension, readers pull out from their general store of knowledge some particular packet of knowledge and use it to provide a framework for the text they are reading. That is, they use information from semantic memory to organize the text they read in order to form a new episodic memory trace (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). The scholars prove that for an adequate discourse understanding a person should possess special structures of knowledge organization – situation models. A situation model is a cognitive representation of the events, actions, and, more generally, the circumstances of the problem (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). According to the theory, situation models are formed during observation and perception of various situations (events, episodes), the following cognitive processing and construction of their mental representations. It should be noted that situations themselves and their representations are not the same because real situations are a specific sequence of events or actions of participants and have certain space and time characteristics. At the same time their representations are fragmentary and generalized to some 1135 https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2020.11.03.120 Corresponding Author: Anastasiya G. Pisareva Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference eISSN: 2357-1330 extent. Situation models reflect the most significant interpretation of events. However, one situation may be interpreted differently depending on the perspective which proves the fact that cognitive models are subjective. Moreover, they are also of social character, otherwise people would not understand each other during communication process. Thus, the principle of situation model construction – schematization – is common for all language users. In the given paper we turn to match reports which, first of all, are represented as text structures. Nevertheless, we tend to think of them as discourse fragments due to the fact that sports discourse as any discourse has a specific style: we can speak differently about the same facts and, consequently, stylistic features will receive semantic, pragmatic, and interactional interpretations. Description is presented from various points of view and people have access to these different perspectival descriptions. We must note that text situation model should be separated from text representation as they do not always coincide. One may remember the text itself as well as the situation presented in it; their structural features may and often do differ greatly. In our research we focused on a socially significant event in the sphere of sport, which is a sport event (match, competition, etc.). It is represented as a referent situation, which is a constituent part of a communicative situation. A referent situation is a designation of a subject of thought that is reflected in the speaker’s mind and which gets further language interpretation that involves variability (Aleksandrova, 2011). The image of a communicative situation refers to the mode of carrying out the conversation; at the same time the image of a referent situation is focused on what is being discussed (Makarov, 2003). Besides, Rubert singles out a component that corresponds to a generalized model of referent situation in discourse structure, in which discourse is understood as a cognitive entity (Rubert, 2001). The generalized concepts devoted to the referent situation components are kept in language user’s memory in the form of models. Shevchenko and Shevchenko also investigated the problem of situation models; they paid particular attention to the coincidence of some situation models belonging to different discourses (Shevchenko & Shevchenko, 2019). 2. Problem Statement The present paper refers to the problem of organizing and representing the cognitive models of various sports events in the media discourse. Specific representation of these models results in foregrounding of some of the model’s components. This foregrounding is determined by the peculiarities of the type of sport being represented and the journalist’s pragmatic goals. 3. Research Questions The present research addresses such questions as cognitive modeling,