What is it about?
Football chants are not just pop songs or classic tunes that are sung by football fans. They are creative and spontaneous expressions of a joint group identity (as fans of a specific club), at a specific time (before kick-off, during the game, after the match) and directed at various addressees (own team, individual players, opponents an their fans). In this paper, I outline what a closer look at the creative schemas that football fans draw on can tell us about the human language faculty in general.
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Why is it important?
The present paper has important implications for our understanding of our linguistic creativity as well as the socially binding force of a joint dialect (i.e. sociolect).
Perspectives
The topic doesn't just fascinate me as a researcher - I am, rather unsurprisingly, also a huge football fan. However, even if you couldn't care less about football, the present paper aims to show how linguistic creativity is also something that plays a great role as a ticket to membership to certain linguistic groups.
Prof. Dr. Thomas TH Hoffmann
KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cognitive Sociolinguistic Aspects of Football Chants: The Role of Social and Physical Context in Usage-based Construction Grammar, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, January 2015, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/zaa-2015-0023.
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