Infinitives in the Sports Press

Introduction

Journalism, as it is known nowadays, searches to transmit all that happens currently in different scenarios almost in an immediate way. In order to present the complex reality, different resources of the written language are exploited by journalists (Cervera Rodríguez, 2016: 266), since they adapt the information that comes from different sources and they present it in a clear and understandable discourse, so that the reading public can understand it easily (Hernando Cuadrado, 2002: 262).

The discourse used in the press has been the study object of numerous research papers (cf. Fonte Zarabozo, 2002, 2008; Casado Velarde, 2008; Gutiérrez Vidrio, 2010, to name just a few). In this book, we focus only on the sports press, since the language used in this type of press has its particular features (Arroyo Almaraz & García García, 2012: 318). Moreover, Hernández Alonso (2012: 105) states that sports journalistic discourse is more daring and freer than other kinds of journalistic discourse. According to Guerrero Salazar (2002: 365), Sports journalists’ main task is not only to inform the reading public about what happens in sports events, but also to produce appealing texts that catch the reader’s attention.

The main goal of our study is to identify the principal constructions with infinitive forms in sports newspaper articles in three different languages: English, French and Spanish. More particularly, we aim to characterize these infinitive constructions from a syntactic-textual approach. Furthermore, our purpose is to determine the most relevant similarities and differences in the infinitive constructions found in each corpus. With this research, we intend to contribute to the non-finite forms’ studies, more particularly to those that focus on infinitives, and to the sports discourse studies, especially in a contrastive perspective.

Based on the objectives mentioned above, we divide our book into six main chapters. In the first chapter we present the theoretical background and the methodology applied to the research. In the theoretical background important concepts such as non-finite forms, infinitives, general journalism, and sports journalism are explained. In the methodology section, there are two main sub-sections: the first one focuses on the way the corpus of each language was selected; and the second one on the classification proposals that were followed in order to examine the three corpora of the research.

The second, third and fourth chapters are dedicated to the analysis of the corpora. The second chapter focuses on the Spanish-language corpus; the third one centers on the French-language corpus; and finally, the fourth chapter studies ←13 | 14→the English-language corpus. These three chapters follow the same pattern. First, there is a section with the main numerical results. Then a section focused on the qualitative analysis. And, finally, a summary with our analysis’ main results.

I Theoretical background

What are non-finite forms?

In order to define the object of this study, i.e., infinitives, it is imperative to consider the distance between the verb and the noun as a continuum which has the concepts of finiteness and non-finiteness as cornerstones (Raible, 2001: 601). In the same way, Sasse (2001) proposes a continuum constituted by the concepts of nouniness and verbiness as the cornerstones. Along both continua there are intermediate instances that do not display all the characteristics of non-finiteness or nouniness or all the features of finiteness or verbiness.

While a verb form loses its verbal (or finiteness) characteristics, it becomes more nominal, this means less finite or more ‘non-finite’. In other words, non-finite is associated with a morphology absence, in particular of tense, person, number, mood, etc. (Johns & Smallwood, 1999: 160). According to some authors such as Trask (1997), non-finites do not carry morphological tense or agreement. Thus, they cannot appear in a main clause as the only verb. In other words, they are only used in non-matrix clauses. Nevertheless, as it will be seen in the following sections, independent infinitives such as interrogative, performative, exclamatory, etc., contradict this statement.

According to Ylikowski (2003: 187), there are four main types of intermediate instances that are situated along both continua: infinitives, participles, converbs (or gerunds) and action nominals. Iturrioz Leza (2000: 99) states that even if these categories are present in many European languages, there is a variation between them at, both, morphosyntactic and functional levels in each language.

Participles are especially used in the attributive function and display adjectival properties (Nikolaeva, 2010). Converbs are basically used in adverbial functions (Haspelmath, 1995: 3–8; Nedjalkov, 1998: 421–422; Ylikowski, 2003: 190–191). Action nominals refer to events or facts and they are used in complement or adverbial clauses. “Action nominals often originate as deverbal nouns and only later acquire a clausal status” (Nikolaeva, 2010). Infinitives are commonly used in the object function in complement clauses (Ylikowski, 2003).

Therefore, non-finite forms are mixed or hybrid categories, since they combine at least two main syntactic features, those of the verb, on the one hand, and those of the noun, the adjective or the adverb, on the other hand (Sasse, 2001: 495; Nikolaeva, 2010). This combination of characteristics constitutes the main reason why these forms cannot be positioned in a simple lexical category. Ylikoski (2003: 190) adds that these hybrid forms usually fulfill syntactic ←15 | 16→functions that are not typical of finite verbs. Hence, it is common that these forms play syntactic roles that do not correspond to verbal categories.

Characterization of infinitives

According to Haspelmath (1999: 111), infinitives are intermediate instances between verbal nouns and converbs, since they are used in complement clauses and adverbial clauses of purpose. Rémi-Giraud (1988: 28) states that infinitives retain only the categories of aspect and diathesis from the verb. This means that the categories of mood, tense and person are apparently lost in the infinitive. However, when communicating, the infinitival phrase can convey an idea of these categories by the cotext and the context.

According to Rémi-Giraud (1988: 68), most languages that have infinitives distinguish between the active (hacer – faire – do) and the passive infinitive (ser hecho – être fait – be done). Moreover, many languages, such as Spanish, French and English, have perfective infinitive (haber hecho – avoir fait – have done) and imperfective infinitive (hacer – faire – do). With the perfective aspect, infinitives can express a completed action, whereas with the imperfective aspect, infinitives can express a continuous action.

Regarding tense, Rémi-Giraud (1988: 17) states that infinitives display certain characteristics that even if they are not totally temporal, they are related to time, particularly with sequences that express the order of a series of actions. Through the perfective and imperfective infinitives and the totality of a text, interlocutors can identify the order in which a specific process happens and determine if this process happens before, after or at the same time as other processes.

In fragments (1) and (2), the perfective infinitives, haber ido in Spanish and avoir donné in French, express that their respective processes happen before other processes, i.e., to be like a break in (1) and to thank God in (2). In example (3) the imperfective infinitives to act express a simultaneous process with the verb to be.

Like tense, modality is not expressed by the infinitive itself. However, a whole infinitive phrase or clause acquires a certain modality because of the cotext and the context in which it is used (Tesnière, 1976: 732). Finally, person is a category that is only expressed by the infinitives of languages such as Portuguese, Sardinian, Galician and Old Neapolitan that have a personal infinitive (cf. Groothuis, 2015). Nevertheless, in other languages, such as Spanish, French and English, an infinitive does not express person per se. Indeed, if the subject of an infinitive is not expressed, it is because it ordinarily keeps the subject of the main verb (Quintero Ramírez, 2015: 184).