How Grammatical Register Distinguishes Objective Reporting From Subjective Commentary in Sports Journalism

Abstract

Sports journalism blends factual narration with editorial commentary, making it a useful domain for studying linguistic markers of objectivity and subjectivity. This study presents a comparative statistical analysis of linguistic style between objective and subjective sports articles, using the Sports Articles for Objectivity Analysis dataset (Rizk and Awad, 2018; 635 objective, 365 subjective articles). Welch's t-tests with Bonferroni correction, complemented by Mann-Whitney U tests, were applied to 37 length-normalised grammatical categories. Twenty-three categories showed statistically significant differences, with effect sizes from small to large (Cohen's d:0.1--1.1). Subjective articles were significantly longer than objective ones.