This paper aims to describe linguistic units expressing the concept team of host country in German, English, and Russian ice hockey language in relation to syntagmatic types and the associative series these units are based on. The research rests on Saussure’s notion of linguistic units, which should be included in a particular syntagmatic and associative class. The study uses corpus linguistic methodology to extract and analyze respective linguistic units from German, English, and Russian comparable sub-corpora comprising utterances from different media reports devoted to the same sporting event. The authors follow a structuralist approach and discover syntagmatic types, including constant and variable elements, and generalizing regularities in the composition of particular syntagmas. Moreover, the authors build associative series serving as bases for different syntagmatic types and indicating semantic opposition of certain linguistic units. The research also establishes various paradigms reflecting relations between the elements within linguistic units and demonstrating the interaction of syntagmatic and associative elements in the production of the means of expression. From the contrastive perspective, the authors compare linguistic units from different languages and focus on similarities they have in relation to the composition of associative series reflecting the speaker’s range of choices of verbalizations. The data was collected from articles published on web pages of German (sportschau.de, spiegel.de), English (bbc.com, ctvnews.ca), and Russian (tass.ru, rg. ru) mass media.

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