“Pass me the ball”: vocal sounds and language-in-action in sport

Abstract This paper draws on principles of sound semiotics and parameters of voice quality to examine the vocal sounds of an Australian Rules footballer who ‘calls for the ball’ from their teammates in the ‘live’ action of a sporting contest. The paper will begin by locating this study in the emerging field of sports linguistics, including recent research which shows how language-in-action in sport ‘breaks down’ typical clause, grammatical and phonological structures to foreground the meaning making of voice quality. Having introduced the data set (ten instances of ‘calling for the ball’, by the same player, from the same game) the paper draws on perceptual analyses (supported by acoustic analysis) to characterise the player’s voice according to its most salient voice quality parameters: loudness, speed and tension. The paper then turns to the data set itself to further identify two distinct voice quality patterns, coined as experiential gestures: ‘grabbing’ and ‘tapping’. The paper concludes by flagging several areas of future research that emerged from the study, including the role of on-field sporting action vis-à-vis voice quality; the co-articulation of lexis and voice quality; and the materiality of voice quality and its intersubjective function.