Maksimov Nickolai

Linguistic representation of TIME in sportscasts

Today popularity of sports is consistently growing. Sport has become one of the spheres of mass culture, it attracts attention of people from all around the globe. With the evolution of television, the internet and every other communication technology it provides more and more people with an opportunity to watch sports of different kinds and to feel themselves involved into action. Moreover, big money is being invested in sports. Sportsmen and sportswomen are becoming popular icons along with musicians, actors and politicians. On the whole we can say that today sport is absolutely ubiquitous and can influence almost each sphere of the social life. There is no surprise that the development of sports industry goes hand in hand with the progress of the events coverage system that allows any person (not necessarily being indulged in sports) to watch, understand and enjoy competitions. In terms of popularizing sports and making it understandable for people the work of sports commentators plays one of the primary roles. It is fair to say, that today sports reportage has shaped as a separate speech genre which requires special attention and has its own specific features and functions. Every speech genre entails the use of certain language and speech means in order to fulfil its functions; sports reportage cannot be counted as an exception. In the presented research work we tried to study the ways of representation of the concept of TIME in sports reportages and find out how it correlates with the specific qualities of this speech genre. The relevance of this research is determined by the relatively young age of the sportscast as a genre and therefore the low degree of its being researched. The research was conducted in the paradigm of cognitive linguistics and based on the texts of