Analyse des interactions verbales dans des matchs de Basketball

Abstract

The following study is part of the verbal interactions made in sport. Verbal interactions are communicative exchanges in which interlocutors act on each other. The development of these exchanges is governed by a set of rules that refer to the social status of speakers and organize the alternation of speech turns. We studied interactions done by students, basketball fans, in three different periods: before, in the middle and at the end of basketball games. The competitive spirit and rivalry that reign over basketball games can give to interactions a conflictive as well as a cooperative form. In order to study both aspects cooperation and conflict and their diverse forms of demonstration, the analysis of our corpus is based on a sociolinguistic approach and the theory of speech acts. Our research method consists in audio recording of interactions, then the analysis of exchanges made between team-mates, opponents and finally, between players and arbitrator. We came to the conclusion that the analysed interactions were dominated by conflict more than cooperation. This result is largely influenced by the competitive context of games and the informal nature of exchanges. We could also see that both aspects cooperation and conflict appear under different forms: cooperation can be turned into a conversation or a negotiation, however, conflict often takes the form of a dispute. Finally, the notion of cooperation can work in two different ways: team-mates cooperate in order to keep their team’s balance, but they also cooperate at the time of a confrontation with their opponents. In the latter case, cooperation plays a role in the conflict’s reinforcement instead of helping in solving it.