Minutes of action! A contrastive analysis of time expressions in English and Norwegian football match reports

Abstract

This contrastive study examines the use of two time expressions – on # minutes and etter # minutes (‘after # minutes’) – in football match reports with the aim of shedding light on their conditions of use in English and Norwegian. The cross-linguistic findings suggest that the patterns are typically used to report on the achievements of players. With regard to syntax, the English pattern is clearly preferred in final position, while the Norwegian pattern is found in either initial or final position, with a slight preference for initial position. A more inconclusive difference can be noted regarding the patterns’ distribution across the 90 minutes; the English pattern is more evenly distributed across the two halves of the match than the Norwegian one.