Sports and linguistics pedagogy

The domain of organized sports offers a unique circumstance to explore a wide range of fundamental concepts in linguistics classrooms. We present an overview of a pedagogical model that engages students of linguistics using data from sports oriented settings, with frequent reliance on peer-reviewed literature. The course model incorporates three domains of language behavior: (a) lexis, and the interplay of semantic specialization and sociocultural indexation of specialized sport-oriented vocabulary; (b) sports announcer talk, a spoken broadcast register whose study enables a novel exploration of syntactic nuance; (c) participant interaction with each other and with the media, which demonstrates fundamentals of pragmatic inference in spoken communicative exchanges. Some course topics span more than one of these domains. Nickname creation, for example, is phonologically and phonetically driven, with gradient effects that adhere to constraints of brevity and clarity, yet linked to sociocultural indexicality. While no single textbook serves as an appropriate primary text for such a course, the beneficial outcomes for students are numerous. Aside from the primary goal of applying linguistic concepts to an engaging domain, students probe a variety of published works that examine sports/language interactions, demonstrating a broad sample of research methods and theories.