Abstract:
Banter, a form of playful and humorous social communication, is deployed in football
discourse on Twitter. Previous studies on banter focused largely on the social bonding
function of banter in daily interaction and the workplace. However, little attention has been
paid to the deployment of banter in football discourse on Twitter. Therefore, this study was
designed to examine the use of banter on Twitter by football fans, with a view to
determining banter categories, banter strategies, linguistic and non-linguistic devices and
politeness strategies employed in the discourse.
Gunter Kress and Theo van Leuwen‘s Visual Grammar, complemented by M.A.K.
Halliday‘s Systemic Functional Grammar and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson‘s
Face Theory, was adopted as the framework. The descriptive design was used. Twitter was
purposively selected because it contains a large corpus of data on football banter through its
football Twitter community platform. One hundred and fifty Tweeter handles were
purposively selected because their tweets deployed both verbal and non-verbal modes. One
hundred and fifty banter tweets, one from each of the Tweeter handles, were purposively
selected. The selected banter tweets were retrieved through the Twitter advance search
platform. The data were subjected to multimodal discourse analysis.
Five categories of banter were identified: football fans-targeted banter, football playerstargeted banter, football managers-targeted banter, football clubs-targeted banter and match
officials-targeted banter. Football fans-targeted banter foregrounded defeat-induced emotional
trauma, hopelessness, and fear and anxiety as subcategories. Football players-targeted banter
was marked by unprofessionalism, professional incapability, incurable obsession, unachieved
personal ambition and injury proneness. Football managers-targeted banter was indicated by
ineptitude coaching and defeat-induced emotional torture. Football clubs-targeted banter was
characterised with financial incapability and unsuccessful transfer. Match officials-targeted
banter was marked by poor and biased officiating. Eight banter strategies were employed,
namely posturing, gesturing, dressing, sarcasm, symbolisation, stereotyping, gazing and
name-calling. Posturing targeted torturing, subordinating and slipping; while gesturing
featured ridiculing poor officiating, fighting racism, ridiculing boasting and mocking constant
failure. Dressing was used for questioning professional ability; sarcasm for poor decisionmaking and unmerited awards; and symbolisation for mocking lack of achievement and
incessant defeat. Stereotyping concerned discriminating against dressing style and naming
system; gazing focused on scorning and teasing; while name-calling involved blackmailing.
The banter categories and strategies were marked by transactional and non-transactional
action and reactionary processes, and conceptual and symbolic representations. The linguistic
devices employed in the banter were coinages, anecdotes, allusion, sarcasm, hyperbole and
pun. Coinages were used for identity damaging; anecdotes were utilised for intimidating;
sarcasm, pun and allusion were employed for mockery; while hyperbole was deployed for
creating impossible scenarios for ridiculing. Off-record and positive politeness were used as
face-saving strategies; while depicting emotional state, body-shaming, mocking professional
failures, bald on-record acts were employed as face-threatening strategies.
Football banter on Twitter is marked with banter strategies, linguistic devices and politeness
strategies aggressively deployed for ridiculing. There is need for policy and legislation
formulation on use and control of social media.