Reframing self-talk in endurance sports using grammatical taxonomy

Abstract

In this paper, we use a linguistic vocabulary to reframe self-talk in endurance sport through a focus on properties of the verbs (both main and auxiliary), nominals, including pronouns and demonstratives, positive or negative sentiment, negation, interrogatives, and exclamations. A focus on grammatical function allows us to analyze self-talk based tense (future, present and past) which prototypically relates to planning, description, and evaluation. Self-talk often serves as self-directed speech acts, where the self-talker is using language to accomplish some goal with respect to herself. A prototypical example is a verb in the imperative mood. The use of auxiliary modal verbs (e.g. must, should, can, will, might) is frequent across three main types of utterances: Deontic modality involving permission and obligation; dynamic modality involving ability and willingness; epistemic modality involving probabilistic judgements. These all function to establish a hypothetical domain for further reflection, which is key in self-talk. Nouns yield a bounded space to and when this is related to the self, we may use 1st and 2nd person pronouns (I/you) and determine the mental distance to the topic using spatial demonstratives (this/that). Positive or negative sentiment can be added using adjectives or adverbs, while negation yields a means for impulse control. We can question our own utterances, and when unexpected things happen, we can use exclamations to communicate surprise. These are all vital mental tools in endurance sports and incorporating them in self-talk research will likely yield more specific self-talk interventions and lead to better performance for athletes.