Syntactic Analysis Of The Language Used By Indonesian Football Commentators

The study aimed to find out whether there are linguistic features used by Indonesian football commentators, i.e. syntactic reduction, syntactic inversion, and heavy noun modification, as proposed by Holmes (2001:247). The study addresses the following question: What kinds of linguistic features exist in Indonesian football commentaries? The data were collected from Indonesia’s World Cup 2014 Qualification match (Qatar against Indonesia), and Indonesia Premier League match (Semen Padang against Persema Malang). The data were collected using an audio tape recorder, then transcribed. The transcribed data were analyzed using theory proposed by Holmes (2001), which classified three different categories of linguistic features of football commentators, i.e. syntactic reduction, syntactic inversion, and heavy noun modification. The study showed that Indonesian football commentaries used linguistic features as proposed by Holmes (2001:247) with a number of variations for each feature. There are three variations in syntactic reduction, which are reduction of subject nouns or pronouns, prefixes meN-, ter-, and ber-, and subject nouns or pronouns plus prefixes meN- and ber-. In syntactic inversion, there are two variations, namely syntactic inversion without reduction and syntactic inversion with object reduction. In heavy noun modification, there are two variations, such as modification before the noun called premodifiers and modification after the noun called postmodifiers. These results proved that language of football commentaries have different forms that can be identified as a variety of spoken language