A Cultural Contrastive Study Of The Chinese And American Impromptu Sports Commentaries

This paper takes the game of National Basketball Association (NBA) as research object, to make a cultural contrastive study of the Chinese and American impromptu sports commentaries. It aims to find out different features of impromptu commentaries between these two countries and then analyze the deep rooted reasons based on a comprehensive understanding of cultural dimensions, ethical thoughts in Chinese Confucianism and Western Christianity. It is hoped that the present study can help to fill in the academic blank of this field and broaden the scope of the study of impromptu sports commentaries.By studying the NBA impromptu commentaries both in Chinese and English, the present paper focuses on three differences between Chinese and American commentators: frequency of the use of exclamatory sentences, sense of humor and frequency of statistics quoted. First of all, it is found that the frequency of the use of exclamations by the American commentators is much higher than that by the Chinese commentators. Moreover, the exclamatory volume is much higher and the tone is much stronger. This is because Chinese culture is deeply influenced by Confucianism which values"ren"(仁),"li"(礼) and Chung Yung(中庸). Thus Chinese people tend to avoid expressing emotions excessively. On the contrary, American culture emphasizes individualism and personality which tends to express emotion more freely than people from collectivist culture like China.Secondly, laughter occurs more frequently in American patterns than in Chinese patterns, and any person related to the game could become the butt of a joke of American commentators. Chinese commentators'humor confines itself mainly to the event itself and the personal tone is more friendly. Due to the Chinese traditional characters of introversion, self-inhibition and modesty, Chinese humor often takes a tolerant view of vice and evil instead of condemning them or laughing at them. While, the Americans are more explorative, aggressive, open-minded and active, which may evolved into the possible reasons why there are more topics related to personal defects and aggression in English humor.Thirdly, the frequency of statistics quoted in American commentaries is obviously higher than those in the Chinese ones. This is because the Americans with their analytic thought pattern divide the technique of NBA into several detailed items, forming various statistics, and then evaluating the teams and players'performances by the numbers. Moreover, low context and monochromic time orientation culture require American commentators to quote statistics frequently to explain situation in the court. Compared with American thought pattern, synthesis is the Chinese thinking way which emphasizes the harmony and wholeness of the world. Therefore, the Chinese commentators will not judge a team or a player according to the statistics alone, but rather synthesize their all-round performances.This paper also points out the limitations and makes recommendations to future researches.