The book Infinitives in the Sports press: a contrastive analysis in English, French, and Spanish explores the uses of infinitives, a non-finite form, in sports journalistic discourse from a syntactic approach. In this fascinating linguistic research, Quintero Ramírez, the author, analyses an ambitious corpus of one hundred and fifty sports articles extracted from fifteen international newspapers. By studying fifty articles written in three different languages (English, French, and Spanish), Quintero aims to identify, enlist, and contrast the main infinitive constructions used in sports newspapers, a type of journalism known to have many particular syntactic and discursive features.

In the first chapter of this book, the author helps the reader understand the key concepts that she will use throughout her work, arming us with necessary knowledge to follow her research. Quintero explains with ease the notion of non-finite forms which, in turn, aids us to comprehend the various features of the infinitives, central object of the present book. Along with the linguistic concepts, the author defines and describes in a simple, concise, and yet amusing manner the textual genre of journalism, focusing of course, on sports journalism, to further elucidate the relevance and particularities of this type of press, mainly in the linguistics field of research.

Within the same chapter, Quintero offers a detailed description of the methodology used to attain the aforementioned objectives of her study. The corpus consists of one hundred and fifty articles reporting on a wide range of sports disciplines (soccer, football, tennis, golf, etc.); fifty articles were written in Spanish, fifty in English, and the final fifty in French. It is worth mentioning that these sports articles were published and found in the online versions of fifteen different international newspapers in a time period dating from the months of February to March in the year 2018. All of the articles were selected at random by the author, following no specific criteria whatsoever. It is important to highlight the author’s enormous commitment to shedding a light on how infinitive phrases are used in the sports press around the world, by not only selecting articles written in three different languages but also from fifteen different countries.

For the analysis of the corpora, Quintero starts by identifying and classifying the infinitives of each language according to the syntactic functions they display, namely infinitive phrase, infinitive clause, and infinitive construction. Taking this analysis even further, Quintero continues by distinguishing the various specific roles infinitives may take within the syntactic functions aforementioned. For instance, she lists the functions of subject, verb complement, noun complement, etc., inside the main function of infinitive phrases; in addition, she describes functions such as exclusion clause, time clause, purpose clause, etc., as part of the infinitive clauses category, while roles such as interrogative infinitives, exclamative infinitives, imperative infinitives, etc., can be found in the infinitive constructions group. Finally, to complete this already exhaustive analysis, Quintero includes in her study the infinitives that are lexicalized and grammaticalized, exploring nominalized infinitives, fixed expressions, and structural words.

The following chapters (II, III, and IV), are dedicated to the specific analysis of each of the corpora, starting with the Spanish-language corpus, continuing with the French-language corpus, and finishing by the English-language corpus. Every one of these chapters follows the order of the analysis presented in the methodology section, classifying each of the infinitive constructions found in the corpus according to the categories and sub-categories stated before. It should not go unnoted the author’s extreme effort to represent each of the abovementioned infinitive categories in a correct, clear, and understandable manner. Quintero not only enlisted a diverse inventory of examples for each and every category but she also showed each infinitive construction along with their cotext, that is, a piece of the article surrounding the example, to further elucidate their functions in the sentence, paragraph or even text.

The fifth chapter contrasts the findings of the three corpora by analyzing, as before, every infinitive construction according to the criteria examined in the methodology, in aims to identify the main differences and similarities of infinitive use between all three languages. Concerning the overall numbers of the three corpora, Quintero reveals that the English corpus contains the biggest number of infinitives in the writing of its articles with a surprising nine hundred and one constructions. The Spanish corpus is positioned as the second most prolific with four hundred and ninety-four infinitives, followed closely by the French-language one, in which four hundred and forty infinitives were counted. On the subject of their functions, in English infinitives tend to perform prominently as verbs while both in Spanish and French they operate more frequently as nouns. On the other hand, lexicalized and/or grammaticalized infinitives were the least productive ones in the English-language corpus, whereas the Spanish-language and the French-language corpora shared as their least productive function the independent infinitive constructions. Interestingly, all three corpora had as their third most used function the infinitive clauses with a junction purpose. In addition, the author reports the newspapers with the highest quantity of infinitives in each corpus, stating that the British newspaper The Guardian gathered the 27.08% of all the infinitives of the English corpus, while in Spanish El Mundo from Spain registered the 29.55%, and finally, for the French-language corpus, Le Monde from France accumulated the 38.41% of the infinitives.

As stated in the methodology, Quintero continues the contrastive analysis focusing now on a detailed description of how infinitives perform within the five main functions described before (noun, verb, clause, independent construction and lexicalized/grammaticalized). For instance, in all three corpora the infinitive phrases with a noun role behave more prominently as a verb complement (despite the English preference for gerunds over infinitives). Infinitive phrases as verbs (verbal periphrases), on the other hand, are classified in four rubrics: gradation, disposition, quantification and modalization, having modalization periphrases as the most productive for the three corpora. Interestingly, the infinitive clauses with a junction communicative objective operate very differently in the three corpora; in English, Quintero identified two semantic values, in French five, and in Spanish seven. However, the most prolific value displayed in all three corpora is the one of purpose. For the independent infinitive constructions, the author explains the type of construction that can be found in each corpus (interrogative infinitives and injunctive infinitives) whereas the lexicalized and grammaticalized infinitives are counted and exemplified.

After deeply analyzing and contrasting the 1,835 infinitives found in the 150 articles that make up the corpus, Quintero Ramírez highlights her most relevant findings in the sixth, and final chapter of her book. Firstly, the author concludes that, in general, the sports press written in English employs the highest number of infinitives, since 901 instances were counted. French and Spanish speaking press, on their part, had 461 and 494 infinitives, respectively. Additionally, in regard to the syntactic traits of infinitives, Quintero distinguishes five main functions in all three languages: noun role, verb role (verbal periphrasis), junction purpose, independent constructions and lexicalized/grammaticalized infinitives. Nevertheless, the productivity of these functions as well as their specific configurations within the text, vary from language to language.

Infinitives in the Sports press: a contrastive analysis in English, French, and Spanish is a detailed and comprehensive study of infinitives in sports journalism, however it is also a very enjoyable reading since the author maintains a simple and light tone that invites you to continue reading. In this book Quintero Ramirez manages to describe, in an understandable and pleasant manner, the way non-finite forms such as the infinitives, are employed in sports articles written in French, Spanish and English around the world.

Quintero took on the enormous challenge of not only examining a wide range of infinitive syntactic functions (rather than focusing on one) but also contrasting them in three different languages and fifteen different countries. The variety of syntactic functions analyzed along with the contrastive perspective that compares the uses and configurations of infinitives around the world, make this book an original and relevant research that contributes greatly to the fields of syntactic studies, contrastive studies, and of course, sports discourse analysis.