Constructing Football Club Identity Online: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Semantic Roles, Evaluative Language and Translation Strategies on the Arsenal and Juventus Official Websites

This thesis investigates how two professional football clubs, Juventus and Arsenal, discursively construct their institutional identities and their relationships with fans in Italian and English official website texts. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Appraisal Theory, the study focuses on the websites’ institutional and historical sections (“About Us” and “History”), considering them central spaces where clubs build their digital brand, present their identity and communicate with audiences across different languages. The data consist of three comparable corpora (about 17,000 words overall): one of L1 Italian texts from the Juventus website, one of L2 English texts from the same website, and one of L1 texts from the Arsenal website, organised into plain-text files. The subjects of finite clauses referring to the clubs and their fans were coded according to their semantic roles so as to identify both the frequency of these roles and the kinds of roles attributed to the clubs and their fans. Evaluative adjectives, nouns and verbs identified in the texts were classified according to Appraisal Theory to explore how they are distributed across the Affect, Judgement and Appreciation subsystems of the Attitude system. Culture-specific football terms were analysed in aligned L1 Italian and L2 English passages from the Juventus club’s texts to identify translation and localisation strategies and to compare these choices with Arsenal’s L1 English discourse. The findings show, first, that the discourse is strongly club-centred: almost all clause subjects refer to the clubs, which are represented as Agents or Carriers of positive attributes, while fans appear rarely in subject position and mainly play the semantic role of Experiencers of emotional states. Second, evaluative language is dominated by the sub-system of Appreciation in constructing prestige, success, institutional values and fan emotions. Third, the translation of Italian-specific football concepts into English relies on various strategies: Italian borrowings, functional equivalents, explicitation, neutralisation and branded calques. In conclusion, the thesis shows that the websites analysed build club-centred narratives in which Juventus and Arsenal are presented as agents, while fans are mainly presented through emotional involvement. In the L2 Juventus English texts, translation and localisation strategies make Italian football culture accessible to an international audience, while preserving traces of local identity.