New Sport Media Language: Lexicon and Culture in New Media

Based on a series of corpora constructed from internet live sports pages, the chapter seeks to answer the question whether English language use is being affected significantly by the advent of new media (the internet, sms messages, twitter and e-mails). The corpora offer the chance to take a snapshot of present English usage in a context that is at once intended to be informative and enjoyable, and at the same time promise the benefit of including many sources of language use in three manageable corpora. Problems both of collection and interpretation are discussed, not least the risk of the effects of normalisation in corpora constructed from internet sites designed to be understood by a wide readership. The concluson is reached that widely-held assumptions about language change tend to be simplistic and English is found to be altered rather less than one might expect by the new media. The author also notes the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to linguistics and lexicography