Sports discourse has gained interest among linguists in the past years especially with the ease of access to publicly available media, such as sports journalism, commentary and broadcasting. Gaining access to unedited data in the settings of sports matches and trainings is, however, much more difficult. This advantage of publicly available, audio-visual and written data in comparison to limited or restricted access to authentic, naturally occurring interactions during games and training is reflected in the current research trends in discourse in/of sports. The exclusivity of this “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger 1991) partially explains the lack of linguistic research into sport training sessions outside of a handful of examples, such as the recent collection by Ross et al. (2026). Repetition has been pointed out as a research gap in the study of conversational grammar (Biber et al. 2021), yet there has only been little research on repetition in a sports context, e.g., in post-match interviews (Wilton 2019; cf. also Reber 2021), and fragmented mentions on training sessions (Ross et al. 2026). The present project aims to fill this gap, investigating recurrent linguistic and interactional patterns of (lexical) repetitions, their embodiment in action and distribution across training session contexts. Audio-visual recordings from training sessions form the foundation of multimodal, interactional analysis. The inspection of repetition begins with the formal aspects of repeated linguistic elements and aims to interpret the social function of the form in relation to the multimodal context it occurs in. The study of linguistic practices in training sessions contributes to the emerging field of discourse in/of sports where repetition as a multimodal feature has so far been underrepresented.

References: Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey N. Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 2021. Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Lave, Jean & Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reber, Elisabeth. 2021. “On the variation of fragmental constructions in British English and American English post-match interviews.” Sociolinguistica 35: 217-241. Ross, Andrew S., David, Caldwell & Yeagan J. Doran (eds.). 2025. Language in Sport: Real-Time Talk in Training and Games. London: Taylor & Francis.

January – September 2025

Teaching Assistant

University of Potsdam

October 2021 - September 2024

Master of Arts

University of Bremen

April 2017 - September 2021

Bachelor of Arts

University of Heidelberg

• Spoken language in various contexts, such as sports
•  (In)justice, identity and power relations in society
• Methods of corpus linguistics and discourse/conversation analysis