Jere Mäntysalo
FOOTBALL AND SOCCER
A Corpus-Based Study on Synonymy
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences Bachelor’s Thesis October 2021
ABSTRACT
Jere Mäntysalo: Football and Soccer: A Corpus-Based Study on Synonymy Kandidaatintutkielma
Tampereen yliopisto
Englannin kielen, kirjallisuuden ja kääntämisen tutkinto-ohjelma Lokakuu 2021
Tämän kandidaatintutkielman tarkoitus oli tutkia sitä, miten lähisynonyymien football ja soccer käyttö eroavat kolmessa englannin kielen varianteissa; amerikanenglannissa, brittienglannissa ja ghananenglannisssa. Pääsyy aiheen valitsemiseen oli se, ettei sanoista football ja soccer ole ennen tehty korpuksiin keskittyvää tutkimusta, kyseisten sanojen yleisestä vastakkainasettelusta huolimatta. Toinen aiheen valitsemiseen vaikuttava syy oli se, että football ja soccer mielletään yleisesti synonyymeiksi, vaikka niiden välillä on usein kontekstillisia erilaisuuksia. Tutkimus toteutettiin korpustutkimuksena, jonka taustakirjallisuutena käytettiin aiempia korpustutkimuksia sekä korpuslingvistiikkaan perehtyviä teoksia. Tämän lisäksi tutkimus perehtyy sanakirjojen antamiin määritelmiin kyseisestä sanaparista.
Aineisto tutkimusta varten kerättiin käyttämällä News on the Web -korpusta, sekä kollokaatioita tutkittaessa British National Corpusta ja Corpus of Contemporary American Englishiä. Korpuksien avulla oli mahdollista kerätä kvantitatiivista dataa sanojen football ja soccer käytöstä Tämä mahdollisti niiden välisen vertailun. jonka tavoitteena oli löytää eroja yleisesti synonyymeina pidetyn sanaparin käytössä.
Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittivat, että sanojen football ja soccer käyttö vaihtelee eri englannin varianttien välillä, eikä niiden käyttö ole rajattu omiin variantteihinsa, kuten soccer pelkästään amerikanenglantiin. Tästä kertoo esimerkiksi lukuisat korpusesimerkit brittienglannin puhujista, jotka ovat käyttäneet socceria puhuessaan englantilaisesta jalkapallosta. Kollokaatioita tutkittaessa paljastui, että britti- ja amerikanenglannin välillä esiintyy eroja muun muassa verbien ja erisnimien esiintyvyydessä. BNC:n ja COCAn kollokaatiot olivat kuitenkin melko samanlaisia sanojen soccer ja football välillä. Mahdollisissa jatkotutkimuksissa olisi esimerkiksi mahdollista tutkia sanaparin käytön diakronista kehitystä, tai tutkia niiden käyttöä muissa englannin varianteissa.
Avainsanat: synonymia, lähisynonymia, kollokaatio, korpuslingvistiikka
Tämän tutkielman alkuperäisyys on tarkastettu Turnitin OriginalityCheck –ohjelmalla
Table of contents
1. Introduction ... 1
2. Theoretical background ... 2
2.1 Near-synonymy... 3
2.2 The dictionary definitions of football and soccer ... 3
2.3 Previous research ... 5
3. Methods ... 5
3.1 Corpus linguistics ... 5
4. Frequency of the words in English variants ... 7
5. Collocations ... 11
6. Analysis of samples from the data ... 12
6.1 The use of football ... 14
6.1.1 Football in British English ... 14
6.1.2 Football in American English ... 14
6.1.3 Football in Ghanaian English ... 15
6.2 The use of soccer ... 15
6.2.1 Use of soccer in British English ... 16
6.2.2 Use of soccer in American English ... 16
6.2.3 Use of soccer in Ghanaian English ... 17
7. Comparing the use of football and soccer ... 17
8. Conclusion ... 19
Bibliography ... 21
1. Introduction
The aim of this thesis is to analyse how the usage of the words football and soccer differ between different variants of English, whether one of the words is more favoured or whether their frequency of use changes between certain English variants. This analysis will be done mainly by using the News on the Web corpus, referred to in this thesis as NOW (Davies 2016-). This particular corpus was chosen for this thesis because it is not restricted to gathering data from only one English variant. Instead, the NOW corpus contains data from multiple different variants of English, three of which were chosen to analyse the occurrences of football and soccer in those variants.
This corpus will be used to search for the frequencies in which football and soccer are used in British English, American English and Ghanaian English. However, due to some technical issues with the NOW corpus, this thesis will use the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) when analysing the collocations of football and soccer. The advantage of using a corpus to study variation between words is that a corpus will present the data in a numerical form, which in many cases can be very straightforward to interpret. Furthermore, in order to preserve clarity, in the future this thesis will often refer to American English as AmE, British English as BrE, and Ghanaian English as GhE. This will make it easier to avoid lengthy and perhaps confusing sentences by abbreviating these terms, which will be used frequently throughout the thesis.
The English language is separated into multiple different varieties, most notably to American English and British English, however, numerous other variants exist as well. It is often taken as granted that English words can be classified as either American or British varieties. Simply put, synonyms are different words that have the same meaning, which are numerous in the English language.
While sometimes it is not an easy task to distinguish which variant of the word is American or British, the synonyms chosen for this thesis are relatively unchallenging in this regard, as the
synonyms are football and soccer. However, other variants of English also use either soccer or football notably more than the other. Thus, this thesis will also look at Ghanaian English to see how the usage of these words in Ghana compare to the two largest English variants, AmE and BrE. The reason why Ghanaian English was chosen for study alongside American English and British
English is the fact that GhE has the highest frequency of use of the word football, as well as a rather high usage of soccer despite clearly favouring football.
It is important to note that although certain words, such as football and soccer, are thought to belong to either American English or British English, this is not the case in all English variants. There is a large amount of variance between AmE and BrE which does not necessarily occur in other English variants, and often there are influences from both AmE and BrE found in other English variants. In other words, the differences of AmE and BrE might not exist in other variants as clearly, and often certain features of both AmE and BrE are mixed within other English variants.
The main bulk of this thesis will consist of the data gathered from the NOW corpus and the analysis of that data. However, the key concepts regarding the subject will be explained, as well as the dictionary definitions of soccer and football. This thesis will also go over some previous research done on corpus linguistics and explain what corpus linguistics actually is. Finally, the collocations of football and soccer will be analysed and compared, after which the data gathered from the NOW corpus regarding their usage in AmE, BrE and GhE will be analysed and discussed.
2. Theoretical background
This section of the thesis will go over the core concepts this thesis will be based on. Those concepts are near-synonymy, corpus linguistics, the dictionary definitions of football and soccer, previous research on the subject and the collocations of the word-pair.
2.1 Near-synonymy
The words football and soccer are considered to be synonyms because they are used to refer to the same sport. However, the usage of these words differs greatly in different varieties of English, most notably BrE and AmE. Unlike in British English, in American English the word football is
commonly used to refer to American football, and the different form of team sport commonly referred to around the world as football is instead known as soccer. Synonymy is often defined as two words that have the same meaning, which could replace each other in a sentence without altering the meaning (Kayaoglu, 2013, 128). However, finding such two words that truly have no change in meaning whatsoever is a challenging feat, due to synonyms often having certain
connotations of semantic differences. Liu (2010, 56) states that “while synonyms express basically the same concept, they often do so in different fashions, for different contexts, and/or from different perspectives”. Because of this, the term near-synonymy is used instead to refer to two words similar in meaning, due to the rarity of the occurrence of perfect synonyms. However, near-synonyms are sometimes not interchangeable with each other. As pointed out by Edmonds & Hirst (2002, 107), they are “not fully intersubstitutable, but instead varying in their shades of denotation, connotation, implicature, emphasis, or register''. For instance, when used in BrE, the word soccer often carries a connotation of referring to association football in America, and as a result, there is a slight
difference in meaning between the near-synonyms football and soccer.
2.2 The dictionary definitions of football and soccer
The dictionaries that were chosen for this thesis were the Macmillan Dictionary as well as the Cambridge Dictionary. Both dictionaries define soccer and football similarly, proving that they indeed can be considered to be synonyms. The definitions for football and soccer in the Cambridge Dictionary are as follows:
a game played between two teams of eleven people, where each team tries to win by kicking a ball into the other team's goal
While in the Macmillan Dictionary soccer is defined as the game of football, and football is defined as:
a game in which two teams of eleven players kick a round ball and try to score goals.
Based on these definitions, it can be concluded that the words football and soccer are synonyms.
In the Macmillan Dictionary, the word football is shown with a usage label British. However, in AmE football refers to American Football and soccer refers to association football, in other words, American English speakers do not have many incentives to use the word football to refer to
anything other than American football. Because of this, it is safe to assume that corpus results of AmE containing the word football are referring to, at least mostly, American Football, not soccer.
Conversely, the results of BrE containing soccer will likely refer to football leagues, such as Major League Soccer. These details will be manually checked however, in an attempt to avoid any
uncertainty and to try to procure the most accurate data possible.
Additionally, the Macmillan Dictionary contrasts the differences of soccer and football in AmE and BrE (s.v. football):
In the UK, football is a sport in which players try to score goals by kicking a round ball into a large net. American speakers call this sport soccer. In the US, football refers to a sport in which players throw, kick, or carry an oval ball into an area at the end of the field to score points. British speakers call this sport American football.
This extract points out the differences of the near-synonyms neatly. The corpus data which will be examined in this thesis will attempt to show this fact in more detail.
2.3 Previous research
While numerous corpus studies have been conducted on various subjects, it is perhaps surprising to find that none have been conducted regarding the differences of football and soccer, since the sport is very popular all around the world and some debate on which synonym is more appropriate surrounds these two words. Nonetheless, this thesis will use previously conducted corpus studies as background material, such as The use of corpus for close synonyms (Kayaoglu, 2013).
3. Methods
The main method of data gathering for this thesis was using corpus linguistics. This section will explain what corpus linguistics is and go over in detail how the NOW corpus works, why it was chosen and how it was used to gather the data.
3.1 Corpus linguistics
A corpus is defined as a “collection of spoken or written texts to be used for linguistic analysis and based on a specific set of design criteria influenced by its purpose and scope” (Weisser 2016, 23).
As the design between different corpora varies greatly, it is important to choose a corpus that suits the needs of one’s particular study. This thesis will gather its data from the NOW corpus, which contains data from “web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present time” (Davies 2016-). The NOW corpus contains more than twelve billion words of data, with approximately 200 million words added each month. It “shows what is actually happening in the language” (Davies 2016-), making it suitable for a corpus study designed to analyse the actual frequency of use regarding certain words.
Additionally, the NOW corpus is able to show the search’s frequency of use sorted into multiple countries. Thus, by using the NOW corpus, this thesis can analyse the use of football and
soccer in different variants of English. These reasons, alongside the massive amount of data
gathered in the corpus, were the reasons why the NOW corpus was chosen for this thesis. However, using a corpus for a study on language variation has its problems. Schilling-Estes (2004, 19)
explains that
... caution must be exercised in comparing corpora to infer variation and change, since different collections may be comprised of slightly different types of data (e.g. data from a different range of registers). In addition, public corpora are limited in that not all of them provide social information on speakers (or writers).
The problem mentioned by Schilling-Estes occurs in the NOW corpus as well. Oftentimes the information regarding the writers, for instance their nationality, is wrong. For example, when categorising the query to show only samples from BrE, there may be samples written by American writers as well. As a result, the queries of the NOW corpus can often contain false positives. Marcus Callies comments that when using corpora that contain data automatically (such as NOW), there are
undoubtedly cases where language data appear on a webpage sorted into a particular country category although the data were not produced by a writer/speaker who speaks the particular variety associated with that country” (Callies 2018, 158).
Since corpora store massive amounts of data, one must be careful when analysing it. In order to avoid false data, the trustworthiness of sources must also be taken into consideration, as well as the context in which the words one is searching for are used in the data. Furthermore, it is likely that the sources for many search results cannot be checked because the writer’s country of origin cannot be traced, or because the links to source text are non-functional.
This study will present tables which show the percentages of correct uses, untraceable authors and non-functional links out of one hundred random search queries from the NOW corpus.
These tables will be presented from each of the three chosen English variants, from both football and soccer. This data will hopefully shed some light into how the usage of these near-synonyms differ between the three chosen variants.
As observed by Kayaoğlu (2013, 3), while dictionaries fail to provide sufficient context, using corpus linguistics to study language “enables us to discern the patterns of language use, language patterns ranging from morphological, discourse to lexicogrammatical ones”. In other words, a corpus allows people to see how language is used, and in what context certain words or phrases occur, even allowing for comparisons between different variants of the same language.
Some corpora can also be used to analyse diachronic changes within languages, however, due to size limitations, this thesis will only focus on the recent use of football and soccer, as the NOW corpus contains data from 2010 to the present.
4. Frequency of the words in English variants
The following tables show the frequencies in which both football and soccer are used in the English variants that are listed in the NOW corpus. This data was gathered on April 3rd, 2021.
1. Graph showing the frequencies of the word soccer in World Englishes.
Graph 1. reveals the usage of soccer in English speaking countries around the globe. What is interesting about these frequencies is the fact that soccer is very often used especially in South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania. Indeed, according to this graph, the common thought of soccer primarily only being used in American English can be deemed to be a misconception. Due to Ghanaian English having a perhaps surprisingly high frequency of use of the word soccer per a million words, as well as one of the highest frequencies of the use of football out of all Englishes listed in the NOW corpora (as shown in graph 2), it will be analysed in addition to the most common English variants, British English and American English. The reasons why BrE and AmE were chosen are rather obvious: they are the two main World Englishes, and they are considered to be the two most important variants of English.
Additionally, by looking at these graphs it can be noted that no English variant listed in the NOW corpus uses soccer more than football. This fact can be considered rather unsurprising though, as football is generally considered to be the “correct” version of the sport. Despite the fact that this is not the case in American English, the popularity of American Football far outweighs the popularity of soccer, meaning the frequency of football is nonetheless higher than soccer.
2. Graph showing the frequencies of the word football in World Englishes
3. Graph showing the overall frequencies of soccer in all variants of English listed in the NOW corpus
4. Graph showing the overall frequencies of football in all variants of English listed in the NOW corpus.
The first noteworthy thing to notice about graph 2 is the fact that American English has a rather high frequency of football. However, it can be assumed that almost all of the uses refer to American football. As expected, the use of football in British English far outweighs the use of soccer, since the British do not often have proper reason to use the American variant of the near-synonyms. It may be somewhat surprising that despite the United States having a massively larger population than Great Britain, football is still used less regularly there. This fact goes to show how popular the sport actually is in Britain.
The second noteworthy thing in this graph is the frequency of use in Ghanaian English. As shown in the first graph, it is evident that in Ghanaian English the term football is vastly more popular than soccer, but despite that there is still a considerable frequency of soccer as well. For comparison, Great Britain is generally known to favour football, with a frequency of 245.18 per million words, whereas soccer only has a frequency of 11.60 per million words, which means that soccer is used approximately 4% as frequently as football in British English. However, in Ghanaian English, soccer is used 12% as often as football.
When looking at the frequencies in the United States, soccer is used 19% as frequently as football, which perhaps suggests that the difference in the frequency of use means a difference in popularity between the two sports. A noteworthy fact about these graphs is that from graphs 3 and 4 it can be noted that the use of both of these words has seen a decrease in their usage per million words since 2020. Since 2019, the word football has seen a 68.27 decrease per a million words, and soccer has decreased by 11,89 words. Though the decrease of soccer might seem insignificant, soccer is not used as frequently as football, which accounts for the seemingly small decrease.
However, during the last decade, neither football nor soccer have seen such a large decrease of frequency in two years as it has now in 2020-2021, as per results of the NOW corpus. It might be reasonable to hypothesize that this decrease is the result of Covid-19, which forced many soccer and
football leagues to cease operations for varying periods of time. This in turn decreased the public interest in the sport, which then resulted in the media discussing the sport less as well. This is most likely the reason why there is a large decrease of use visible in the NOW corpus, which gathers its data from the news media. This is a perfect representation of how events in real life events and phenomena ultimately affect how language is used.
5. Collocations
As Martin Weisser (2016, 282) explains, collocation is “the characteristic co-occurrence of lexical patterns involving two or more words within a certain (limited) distance of one another, usually up to 4– 5 words to the left or right of the word under investigation”. In other words, collocation is a combination of a specific word and other words which often occur in its context. Additionally, Jones and Waller (2015, 192) state that “these partnerships are not random but reoccurring patterns in use.”
Searching for collocations of football in the NOW corpus proved challenging, as the word occurs too frequently in the data, which caused the NOW corpus to present multiple errors. As a result, this section will utilize the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). However, using these two corpora restricts the results to only show British and American English, leaving out the collocations in Ghanaian English. Nonetheless, the results of collocation found in COCA and BNC should reveal the collocations of soccer and football in a suitable manner for this thesis.
When looking at the collocates of football in both of these corpora, numerous differences can be found between American and British collocates of the word. For example, while some collocates occur very frequently in both, such as play, BNC shows a large frequency of proper nouns, such as names of football teams, as well as nationality nouns; English, American, Liverpool,
Chelsea et cetera. On the contrary, the COCA results contain significantly less proper nouns and nationality nouns, only a few such as Canadian and Australian.
Additionally, it is perhaps noteworthy that in the BNC American has the third highest frequency of all collocates, whereas COCA contains no example of American being used as a collocate for football, only containing collocates such as all-American.
Unsurprisingly, the frequencies of the collocates that occur with soccer declined drastically compared to the collocates of football. Although, as could be expected, the collocations of football and soccer were very similar to each other, excluding for example some verbs which quite clearly are used to refer to either American football or soccer, such as dribble (soccer). Interestingly, the word team is a more frequent collocate of soccer, whereas club is a more common collocate for football, which, among other collocational variations, shows a difference in terminology between BrE and AmE, as well as difference in terminology used with association football and American football.
6. Analysis of samples from the data
This section will go over the gathered data and use it for analysis and discussion regarding the use of the two near-synonyms in BrE, AmE and GhE. The data will be presented in two tables, which showcase the different usages of football and soccer in the three English variants.
The data which will be analysed in this section was fully gathered from the NOW corpus.
The searches themselves were conducted by analysing one hundred random samples of the use of football and soccer in three English variants, British English, American English and Ghanaian English. The examples were categorised into different columns based on their properties, which will be explained in the following sections. For instance, when looking at AmE, if the example sentence used football to refer to American football instead of association football, it would be categorised as such. The same applies for cases where the sentence refers to association football. Additionally, the
NOW corpus contains a feature that enables the user to open the links to the news articles which the corpus presents alongside the query results. This feature is helpful when conducting a corpus study such as this one, as it makes it possible to check, for instance, the writer of the article and their nationality. The ability to manually check these properties of the sample gives the user a possibility of removing some false data which sometimes appears in the query results of the NOW corpus, which in the end allows the user to gather more accurate data. In unclear cases this feature was utilized, and the original article had to be checked, and in these cases sometimes the author’s nationality was unclear, or the link did not function. These cases were also marked into their respective categories.
Additionally, some of the example uses of soccer and football referred to proper nouns, such as Major League Soccer or Spanish Football Federation. The uses of proper nouns were also categorised into their own column because it was often challenging to determine whether the use of soccer or football was due to the writer using them in a proper noun or not. For instance, an American writer discussing Major League Soccer can be deemed as a more normal use of the word than a British writer discussing the same subject.
However, the categories used varied in some cases between soccer and football. For example, when analysing the use of soccer in BrE, one of the categories was reference to
association football in America, whereas the same category was labelled reference to football not in America for the analysis of AmE.
To make it easier to understand, this thesis will talk about football played in America and association football, in order to avoid confusion with terms such as American football and make the region that is being discussed clear.
6.1 The use of football
When analysing the usage of football, the samples gathered from the NOW corpus were categorised into following sections: reference to association football, reference to American football, non- functional link, author’s nationality different from [the English variant being analysed], unidentifiable author and reference to proper nouns.
Reference to association football
Reference to American football
Non- functional
link
Different nationality
Unidentifiable author
Proper nouns Football
in BrE
90 1 1 0 0 8
Football in AmE
4 79 3 2 0 12
Football in GhE
89 0 0 0 1 10
Table showing the frequencies of football divided into six categories.
6.1.1 Football in British English
Contrary to American English, British English showed results that were, unsurprisingly, vastly different from American English. Out of one hundred examples, 90 referred to association football and only one referred to American football. This difference clearly shows the large difference in popularity of the two sports in Britain.
6.1.2 Football in American English
In American English, as could be expected, the word football referred to American football 79 times out of a hundred, and it referred to association football only four times, as well as twelve times to proper nouns. However, all of the cases referring to proper nouns were written by American authors and using proper nouns referring to American football.
There were three cases of non-functional links and two cases of non-American authors.
6.1.3 Football in Ghanaian English
When looking at the results of Ghanaian English, it could be noted that they were rather similar to the results of BrE: 89 samples referred to association football, and 10 samples referred to proper nouns. There were zero samples which referred to American football, and one case of an
unidentifiable author.
6.2 The use of soccer
Unlike football, the word soccer had considerably more variance in the three English variants. The samples gathered for this section were categorised very similarly as the samples of football:
reference to association football, reference to association football in America, non-functional link, author’s nationality different from [the English variant being analysed], unidentifiable author and reference to proper nouns.
Reference to association football
Reference to association football in America
Non- functional
link
Different nationality
Unidentifiable author
Proper nouns
Soccer in BrE
15 19 6 16 18 26
Soccer in AmE
62 0 14 3 5 16
Soccer in GhE
58 2 3 0 6 31
Table showing the frequencies of soccer divided into six categories.
6.2.1 Use of soccer in British English
First, looking at British English, the use of soccer was divided into the following categories:
reference to football, reference to association football in America, non-functional link, author’s nationality different from [the English variant being analysed], unidentifiable author and reference to proper nouns.
When looking at the tables, it is plain to see that there is a lot of variance in the results. Out of one hundred, 15 samples referred to association football, and 19 referred to association football in America. There were 26 cases where the sample referred to proper nouns, which most often was Major League Soccer, a soccer league in America. Non-functional links occurred six times,
unidentifiable authors occurred 18 times, and 16 samples were written by non-British authors, making them false positives.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the uses of soccer in BrE often discusses association football in America, however, perhaps a surprising amount of the samples were indeed discussing football in various other regions outside of America, such as England and Scotland. It is curious why the writer of those samples chose to use soccer in these instances, since football is considered to be the correct alternative of the two near-synonyms for British speakers, but this exemplifies the fact that the usages of football and soccer are not restricted to their respective regions and that they can be substituted for another despite the speaker’s nationality, even though one variant is more favoured.
6.2.2 Use of soccer in American English
When it came to American English, the results were far more one-sided. There were 62 cases where soccer was used to refer association football in America, and zero cases of it being used to talk about non-domestic football. Major League Soccer was again a frequently used proper noun, which occurred 16 times. Non-functional links occurred 14 times, non-American authors 3 times and
unidentifiable authors 5 times. These results come as no surprise, considering the fact that soccer is the preferred term to use in AmE.
6.2.3 Use of soccer in Ghanaian English
The results of Ghanaian English barely mentioned association football in America at all. Two examples referred to it, while 58 referred to association football and 31 samples were proper nouns.
Additionally, there were three non-functional links and six unidentifiable authors. It is perhaps curious to see how the usage of proper nouns compare with the two near-synonyms in Ghanaian English. While the proper nouns used with football were all cases of football associations, such as The Confederation of African Football, the proper nouns associated with soccer were mostly about soccer betting and signing up to play a game called ESPN fantasy soccer.
In addition, there was also a sample which clearly contrasts the use of football and soccer in Ghanaian English, and perhaps English overall: “Alabi discerns contrasting features between how football - or soccer, as Americans would rather term it” (Davies 2016-). The division of the two near-synonyms shown in this extract is a clear example of how, at least in Ghanaian English, football and soccer are mostly used to refer to different sports.
7. Comparing the use of football and soccer
This section will go over the data and compare the use of football and soccer of the three English variants. First, in BrE there was a vast difference of use between the two near-synonyms. While football was used more than 90% of the time to discuss the sport in Britain as well as elsewhere, soccer was most often used to refer to football played in America. However, the samples were very evenly distributed among the selected categories, and while many samples did indeed refer to football in America, that occurred only in 19 of the samples, whereas 15 referred to association
football. It is thus clear that, although it may be a slightly rare occurrence, soccer is used in British English to talk about football, and it is not only used to talk about the sport in America, but also in general too. Though, it must be noted, the use of football far outweighs the use of soccer in BrE.
As can be seen from the data presented above, there are no surprises regarding the usage of football, at least for BrE and AmE. British people have no reason to use football to refer to anything other than its original meaning. American football is not very popular in Britain, which explains its low usage. American speakers have a different word that is used to refer to association football, which explains the rarity of its use in actually referring to football. However, the results of BrE and GhE were somewhat similar in that both favoured the use of the term football to talk about
association football. The similarity between BrE and GhE definitely stems from the popularity of football in both of those countries.
In addition, there was a quote in a sample of AmE which exemplifies the different meanings football can have in American English, where the writer contrasts the two meanings: “the
differences between football and football” (Davies 2016-). This example clearly differentiates American football and association football from each other, though it is somewhat curious why the American writer of the article did not choose to use the word soccer rather than football.
Nonetheless, the extract makes it clear that football holds multiple connotations in American English, though reference to association football seldom occurs.
Looking at AmE, the data offers practically no surprises. The data supports the general consensus that in America soccer refers to association football and football refers to American football, and the data reflects that. Only four cases out of a hundred where football referred to association football, and there were no cases where soccer referred to football not played in America. Unlike the data of BrE, where the results were very different for football and soccer, the data results of AmE were fairly similar for both of the near-synonyms.
The data results of Ghanaian English somewhat resemble the results of British
English. Football is used solely to refer to association football, and there is no mention of American football, which is to be expected, however, since the sport is not as popular as football outside America. Additionally, the samples of soccer contained significantly more proper nouns than the samples of football. This might be due to the fact that since football is overall the accepted term for the sport in GhE, the results of soccer tended to refer to soccer leagues and websites et cetera. Thus, soccer is used when discussing things that have set names, whereas football is more commonly encountered in news articles and everyday speech which talk about the sport in a general manner and which do not refer to, for example, organisations with proper nouns. The same phenomenon is encountered in BrE as well, where the results of soccer contain significantly more proper nouns than those of football. The explanation offered for GhE can explain this as well, since in BrE it is standard to use the word football rather than soccer.
As can be noted from the data, this phenomenon does not occur in American English, which is likely due to the fact that there is no significant difference between usage of the proper nouns soccer and football in AmE. Unlike BrE and GhE, AmE uses both of the near-synonyms to refer to different sports, which is why the way in which both the words are used tends to be similar.
8. Conclusion
The purpose of this thesis was to analyse the differences which manifest themselves in the usage of football and soccer in BrE, AmE and GhE. The results show that the use of these near-synonyms vary greatly within the English variants, and that despite the use of soccer and football being generally considered to be restricted to certain variants, there is nonetheless evidence of them being used outside of their “own regions”.
While the collocations of football and soccer were rather similar in BrE and AmE, they contained some differences regarding frequency of certain verbs, for instance. The analysis of
the data gathered from the NOW corpus shows that there indeed exists, as expected, large variation in the use of the word pair in the chosen English variants. However, some results were unexpected, such as the fact that in BrE, the word soccer was used multiple times to refer to association football, despite British speakers not having a proper reason for it.
However, for future research on this topic, it might be beneficial and interesting to focus on the diachronic changes that perhaps have occurred in the use of these near-synonyms, in order to determine how the use of the word pair has altered and evolved over time. The collocation section of this study focused only on American English and British English, which means that the
collocations of other English variants could be looked into in future research.
Furthermore, due to the size of this study, only one hundred samples of both words were analysed for each English variant. The sample size could be worth increasing in the future, as there were multiple cases in the NOW corpus where the sample was unsuitable for research, such as non- functional links and samples from the wrong English variant. As this thesis was conducted as a corpus study using the NOW corpus, the angle of research was very straightforward and, for some purposes, limited. The NOW corpus only contains data from news articles on the web, which are only a marginal manner in which language is used. As a result, for future study regarding this or a similar subject, it may be wise to utilise another method of study besides corpora or choose a corpus that collects data from other genres of language. However, for the aims of this thesis, the corpora that were chosen provided ample data regarding the language variation of the chosen word pair.
In conclusion, the data presented in this thesis revealed the type of variation that exists in the use of these two near-synonyms, as well as showed in what context they are used. Due to the limitations of this thesis, however, the general conclusions that can be drawn from the data and its analysis regarding football and soccer are perhaps somewhat limited. Nonetheless, this study has hopefully shed some light into the usage of these two near-synonyms.
Bibliography
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Cambridge Dictionary. Cambridge University Press & Assessment. 1999.. Available from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available from https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
Davies, Mark. 2016. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW). Available from https://www.english- corpora.org/now/
Macmillan Dictionary. Macmillan Publishers Limited 2009–2021. Available from https://www.macmillandictionary.com/
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Callies, Marcus. 2018. Patterns of Direct Transitivization and Differences Between British and American English. Studies in Language Companion Series. Vol. 195
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Liu, Dilin. 2010. "Is it a Chief, Main, Major, Primary, Or Principal Concern?: A Corpus-Based Behavioral Profile Study of the Near-Synonyms." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
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