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.
