A discursive construction of teasing in football fandom: The context of the South-Western Nigerian viewing center

Previous research on the linguistics of football fandom has said little on the value of teasing in this popular public space. This qualitative study, however, highlights the discourse of teasing as realized by Nigerian fans of the English Premier League (EPL), from a pragmatic perspective. In all, 12 teases or teasing expressions, ascribed three judgmental values - positive, neutral, and negative - as assigned by both the teaser and the teased are identified and analyzed. It is discovered that when other-directed, the tease is usually either neutral or negative, but when self-directed, the tease is either neutral or positive. First, I observe that fans often use a tease when their team is in a position of advantage. Second, the teaser-target relationship is ever-fluid: the teasers could become the targets at any time during the course of a match, depending on the in situ performance of the teams playing the game. I argue that despite the face threats expressed by most of the teases, the performance of teasing in this fandom is essentially face-supportive, since the fans, on the whole, enjoyed the teases, and forgot about or discountenanced them almost as soon as the game was over. I also submit that the context of football fandom in the viewing center is mainly a macro-level instantiation of 'jocular mockery', more of relational connectedness than separateness, since the fans usually remain friends/acquaintances after each game and would return, sooner or later, to watch and tease one another during another game.