International Journal of English Linguistics; Vol. 8, No. 2; 2018 ISSN 1923-869X E-ISSN 1923-8703 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 244 Pragmatics of Sports News Reports Fareed H. Al-Hindawi 1 & Ramia Mirza 2 1 College of Education for Human Sciences, University of Babylon, Iraq 2 College of Science for Women, University of Baghdad, Iraq Correspondence: Ramia Mirza, College of Science for Women, University of Baghdad, Iraq. E-mail: ramia.mirza@gmail.com Received: September 30, 2017 Accepted: October 30, 2017 Online Published: December 23, 2017 doi:10.5539/ijel.v8n2p244 URL: http://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v8n2p244 Abstract The paper aims to build the structure of sports news reports by bridging them to pragmatics hence coming up with their pragmatic structure. Accordingly, two pragmatic concepts (viz. cooperative principle and speech acts) are believed to be helpful in performing this task. Moreover, the notion of dialectical relevance, developed by Walton (1995), is utilized. This is done by pragmatically analyzing eight news reports of different sports (football, tennis, formula1, and golf, respectively) taken from the BBC sports official website. The analysis is carried out by means of an eclectic model developed by the study itself to serve this aim. This type of analysis is supported by a statistical analysis to quantitatively validate its findings. The two types of analysis basically show that there are no major differences between the games analyzed as to employing the various strategies compiling the aforementioned analytic tool. Keywords: summary category, main events category, headline, lead 1. Introduction 1.1 The Problem Simple as it might seem, the language of sports news reports does have a number of features shaping its distinctive “charisma”. The unfolding of such features is the main concern of this paper. To start with, sports news reports might be a sparse source of exhibiting linguistic stylistic variation. This is due to the kind of events they rest on, which allow no embellishment as done with other types (e.g., political). Yet, this does not connote poverty of the source; it just highlights the challenge of investigating such a type of data. Hence, this research attempts to answer the following question: Do the various sorts of sports (that is, those selected for analysis) differ in their employment of the strategies configuring their pragmatic structure? To perform this task, the paper starts with defining the concept of news and unfolding its generic structure. Then, the pragmatic structure of sports news reports is constructed in a way that accords with the aim of this paper. Then, a model is developed to serve this aim. The workability of the model is tested by analyzing eight reports on different sports taken from the BBC sports official website. 1.2 Literature Review 1.2.1 What Is News? Though common and simple it is, the concept of news is so kaleidoscopic that it cannot be easily defined. Such multiplicity is conspicuously demonstrated in the batch of characteristics cited below: News is based on the 3 W’s: women, wampum and wrongdoing. When a dog bites a man that is not news because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, it’s new. Journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is dead” to the people who never knew that lord Jones was alive. (Web source: 1) Each of these properties sheds light on a different aspect of news: core, surprise, and manipulation respectively. Thus, defining this notion moves on a different path from what is traditionally known about defining any concept. This paper invokes Bell’s (1991, p. 3) approach and the characteristics cited in web source 1 to draw news proper in general and identify sports news in particular, as they are the data under scrutiny.