| Summary: | The issue of temporal patterning and its relationship with discourse structure has received considerable attention within recent research on tense and aspect. Most analyses of spoken data involve 'narratives' of various types, while work on written texts has explored literary narrative as well as different types of journalistic text. With specific reference to sports journalism, a small of amount of corpus-based research has been carried out on macrostructural features and tense usage in journalistic sports reports. By contrast, there are very few linguistic analyses of spoken sports commentaries, although the literature on tense and aspect generally views live sports commentary as prototypical 'Current Report' and contains many anecdotal comments regarding the dominance of the present tense. Based on a transcribed and encoded corpus of television and radio rugby commentaries, and drawing on the vast body of work on tense and aspect in discourse, this thesis analyses the macro-structure of spoken sports commentary and proposes a framework that can capture the key global features of the discourse. It examines the temporal patterns attested and explores the link between macro-structure and temporal patterning. The investigation of temporal patterning focuses on tense usage (particularly of the present tense), but also expands into broader questions prevalent in current research around temporal cohesion, such as the role of temporal connectors, as well as the functions of distinctive elements of sports commentary such as temporal reminders. The discussion includes a detailed analysis of the temporal features of 'Current Report' sections of sports commentaries and proposes that 'Current Report' can be considered a discourse mode. with distinctive temporal properties. Finally, the thesis analyses the differences between radio, television and written sports commentaries, arguing that both oral media share a set of distinctive linguistic features which are very different from those of written sports reports.
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