Participant roles and embedded interactions in online sports broadcasts

Many communicative events in the media are structurally rather complex, containing several levels on which utterances are produced, mediated and received. The present chapter applies and develops Goffman’s notion of embedded interactions and their participant arrangements by identifying several distinct interactional frames found in modern media genres. Using data from online sports commentaries, the article documents how the individual frames of interaction are represented and linguistically reflected in the written text of the commentary and how the existence of such frames affects the participation framework of the entire communicative act. The analysis distinguishes between horizontal interactions, occurring on the level of the interactants within a specific frame, and vertical interactions, which cut across the boundaries of the communicative frames and which may be addressed to fictitious and non-present as well as real recipients. Since the modern media reach out to the audience by providing for their active involvement, the participant role of the audience as recipients is changing to the extent that they can become co-producers of parts of the media text. Thus, while participants are shown to have multiple roles, the distinction between the production and the reception sides of communication becomes blurred in those genres that encourage or provide for active audience participation.