Communication and Sport

List of tables

Table 1. Typology of the audiences faced by institutional communication

Table 2. Typology of issuers of institutional communication applied to sport

Table 3. Types of messages and senders in institutional sports communication

Table 4. Languages used on sports websites

Table 5. Sections and themes on sports websites

Table 6. Languages used in the official web communication of official sports federations and institutions

Table 7. Official nomenclatures of Olympic sports. Summer and Winter Games

Table 8. Official nomenclatures of Olympic exhibition sports. Summer and Winter Games

Table 9. List of non-Olympic sports according to the IOC

Table 10. Metaphors included in the dictionaries. Spanish and Italian

Table 11. Sports metaphors in Spanish and Italian, inscribed in allegorical contexts

Table 12. Archaic sports metaphors

Table 13. Spanish sports metaphors without corresponding Italian ones

Table 14. Sports metaphors in the field of economics in the USA

Table 15. Ranges of subject areas in the names of establishments in Almeria, Łódź and Tarrasa

Table 16. Percentages of sports signage according to the type of establishment in the communities of Almería, Łódź and Tarrasa. in the communities of Almeria, Łódź and Tarrasa

Table 17. Percentage distribution of languages in the naming of sports entities in Almeria, Łódź and Tarrasa

Table 18. Percentage distribution of languages used in sports establishments in Almeria, Łódź and Tarrasa

Table 19. Percentage distribution of languages used in the physical activity and sports centres of Almeria, Łódź and Terrassa

Table 20. Games and distractions. Contrastive thematic distribution 1993–2014

Table 21. Active and passive sport. PIDL 1993 and 2014

Table 22. Professions and trades. 1993–2014

Table 23. The city. 1993–2014

Table 24. The school. 1993–2014

Table 25. Thematic areas of the school’s focus of interest (1993 and 2014)

Table 26. Central value in the community of Almeria

Table 27. The imaginary of in the Almeria’s community

Introduction

Science never ceases to unfold amid a subtle paradox. It deals with areas of life that, ultimately, everyone shares. However, it does so in a way that is difficult for non-specialists to access. Both components of this paradox, if anything, appear necessary and unavoidable. Committed to – and obligated to – the greatest possible precision, it requires highly refined, highly specialized instruments and logical tools. Science also employs its own terminology, far from the idiomatic standard, always striving for the accuracy that characterizes it, and this precision begins with the very concepts it handles. To the extent that its lexical corpus provides a prototypical example of what is considered a technolect in the literature: a vocabulary suited only for technicians and specialists who work with it.

On the other hand, the great milestones of science have never tended to be detached from the fundamental aspects of human existence. They have provided profound insights into it, attempted to explain it, and even allowed us to intervene in its course. Hence, the tremendous significance of scientific knowledge, ultimately destined to project itself into the collective sphere from which it emerges and in which it is deeply ingrained.

Communication processes are at the core of human nature. They are one of the components of life that are meant to be approached, in one way or another, from a scientific perspective. Communication explains a part of the evolution of the human species itself, as well as its specific skills in accumulating and transmitting knowledge. Moreover, it constitutes a sine qua non condition for the functioning of their societies. At least, that is the conviction conveyed by Maturana &Varela in their work Árbol del conocimiento (Tree of Knowledge, 1974), a work that served as a milestone in several disciplinary domains. First and foremost, it was a milestone for paleontology within its own coordinates. Nevertheless, its impact on linguistics and semiotics was equally significant. Maturana and Varela point out that language was integrated as genetic information because the species had a peremptory need for it. Without its high specialization and the immense possibilities, it offered in comparison to other forms of animal communication, the species would not have survived or evolved in the way and to the extent that it did. In turn, language supported more complex communication systems, directly or indirectly associated with its potentialities. Thus, for Maturana and Varela (1984), there is a decisive link between the development of human language, socialization, and the evolution of the species it2self. The history of human collectivities has, of course, amply endorsed this approach. In every time and place, communication has been an inherent factor in the daily dynamics, developing multiple tasks, being the object of attention by the political powers, and ultimately energizing societies.

Thus, inevitably, human knowledge had to take an interest in everything related to communication, significance, and human interaction through shared meanings. In fact, this has seemingly been the case since ancient times. At least, the list of precursors has grown as histories of semiotics have emerged (Eschbach and Trabant, 1983; Calabrese, 2001; Beuchot, 2013; the special issue of De Signis, 2016; Castañares, 2014). This interest also extended to nearby disciplines such as linguistics. Serrano (1979) attributed the Stoics with the merit of being the first formulators of explicit concerns about signs and signification. In a broader sense, medieval thought did not disregard them either, from Augustine of Hippo or Raimon Llull to the modalists (Eco, 2007, 2012; García Marcos, 2009). The appearance of the Renaissance did not change these interests, even if they were oriented towards other assumptions. In 1632, John Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis appeared with a more than explicit orientation in that direction. In a more diffuse manner, although no less reliable, it is possible to identify characteristics that foreshadow semiotics in Locke (Eco, 2012; Escudero Chauvel, 2016), the encyclopedists (Auroux, 1979), Condillac (Coratelli, 2016), or in the design of artificial languages and logical systems, as exemplified in the case of Leibniz (Serrano, 1993: 25).

Naturally, the list of precursors is open to expansion, just as new perspectives can be incorporated into the interpretation of the past. This profusion in the disciplinary genealogy led Eco (1984) to consider that, in reality, a significant portion of semiotic approaches has been implicit in the thinking of most great philosophers. The attempt to explain semiosis was a philosophical constant that, in various forms, spanned different eras.

In any case, it was necessary to wait until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries to find the first foundations of a distinct scientific discipline. Certainly, this phase came with the inevitable hesitations that accompany the initiation of any new field. However, it’s equally certain that it established its own specialized and individualized framework within the scientific paradigm.

This foundational character is commonly attributed to Charles S. Peirce, starting with two articles published in 1867 and 1869. There, we unquestionably encounter the initial formulation of the theory of semiosis and sign production processes that played a pivotal role in the early development of semiotics (Escudero, 2016: 9). Nonetheless, Peirce deserves credit not only for the first substantial attempt to define an independent discipline but also for formulating concepts that remain relevant in contemporary literature. Peirce’s well-known tr:iads – icon/sign/symbol, on one hand, and sign/object/interpreter, on the other – continue to serve as fundamental and indispensable references for semiotic approaches.

Moreover, Peirce’s concerns were not so distant from those of other contemporary authors, even though they did not manage to outline a clearly delimited field of concerns as the American author had achieved. De Saussure (1916) considered that linguistics had to be integrated into a more general theory of signs. He only referred it to social psychology, given that he understood signification as a process of a predominantly mental nature. Voloshinov (1929), on the other hand, delved into the ideological nature of signs and their transmission in societies. His perspective was explicitly opposed to that of the Genevan. What for De Saussure was individual and arbitrary, in Voloshinov appears linked to collectivity and ideological motivation. But both, beyond their profound differences, shared the conviction that language ultimately led to broader social systems of meaning.

De Saussure and Voloshinov are two references with enormous influence in the humanistic sciences, especially at a time of disciplinary foundations such as the one experienced at the beginning of the 20th century. They proved to be crucial figures, in the first instance, for the immediate development of linguistic and literary studies, both of which were already independent and detached from the philological paradigm. But they also exerted a notable influence on other disciplines, also emerging at that time. Among them was semiotics, whose concerns continued to develop during the first half of that century. It is true that sometimes they moved within a broader scope of concerns, integrating themselves into other disciplines of more or less proximity. The different disciplinary versions developed by structuralism allowed for the development of a semiotic aspect in narratology (Propp, 1928), anthropology (Dumézil, 1924; Lévi-Strauss, 1958), or linguistics (Hjmslev, 1943). However, this did not prevent the development of a progressively autonomous model, which was ultimately responsible for sustaining the first disciplinary foundation undertaken by Peirce. In this endeavor, the appearance in 1938 of Foundations of the Theory of Signs will be decisive. With it, Ch. Morris initiated a line of concerns, not without controversy, which would be continued in Morris (1946, 1964 and 1971). Morris was, above all, a pragmatist philosopher, with strong positivist convictions. To develop his conception that all thought rests on a sign, he took up Peirce’s triads and reworked them into a semiotic philosophy. This adaptation of Peirce’s original ideas has not always convinced the subsequent literature. Nevertheless, regardless of Morris’s interpretative rectitude, the fact is that he ended up developing a theory of the sign that, in the end, had a notable influence (Peirce, 1977).

All that activity allowed that in the 1960s there was a more than consolidated scientific domain, from which it was defended that any social field was crossed by multiple processes of communication and signification (García Marcos, 2015: 70). That has been, of course, a solid meeting point between the main modern formulations of semiotics, already settled and with a relatively consolidated disciplinary demarcation (Barthes, 1970; Eco, 1964, 1968; Greimas, 1976; Lotman, 1973, 1979, 1984; W (1987): Serrano, 1979, 1993). From them it has been possible to cover a certainly vast range of interests, in which semiotics has shown an evident versatility to examine a very diverse number of contexts. There have been approaches to musical semiotics (Martin, 1978), as well as cultural semiotics in general (Lotman’s concept of semiosphere, 1979), The outlook has even been broadened to the animal world (Mondragón-Ceballos, 1994), or the microcellular realm (García Marcos & García Mateo, 2020).

Semiotics, therefore, has a wide range of fields, which in any case does not exclude the possibility of incorporating new topics to its interests, especially from an interdisciplinary perspective. In fact, Morris (1938) insisted on the double scientific function that can be attributed to semiotics. On the one hand, it would constitute one more discipline in the contemporary scientific paradigm. But also, on the other hand, it could act as a meta-science; that is, as an instrument through which to examine and/or complement other disciplines.

From this last consideration, of semiotics as a metascience, an even broader potential than it has developed up to that moment implicitly emerges. At least as a theoretical and methodological hypothesis, it would be possible to consider the extension of semiotics to hitherto unexplored, or almost unexplored, disciplinary domains.

Basically, this is the challenge that underlies this work, as it proposes to enter one of those domains that has been little explored up to now, the field of sports semiotics. It does so with the most undeniable modesty and the deepest of precautions, but also with enormous enthusiasm. Of course, we are aware of the risk involved in tackling a subject that lacks overall references. There are semiotic approaches to physical-sports activity, but they address specific issues and not in a systematic way. All of them will be described in the corresponding sections. At the same time, however, it is argued here that it is possible to elaborate a broader and more general model, capable of addressing any kind of intersection between communication and sport.

To this end, it is assumed that sport allows for an exhaustive overview of the semiotic panorama, given that there are various processes of semiosis at various levels of its reality. In fact, demonstrating and justifying this intuition is the main objective of the lines that follow this introduction.

For all that has been said, it is evident that it has entailed a scientific challenge. Moreover, it has become an intellectual adventure, as we have tried to move between terrains that are not so usual and frequented neither for semiotics nor for sport. This transit must lead to the establishment of a scientific topology around semiotics and sport, always within the theoretical sphere, but at the same time connected to empirical reality. So much so that a theoretical elaboration supported by the empirical reality is defended, formalized through the main references in the specialized bibliography on the sports included in this work. At the end of this work, a table is included as an appendix that accurately indicates the references used for each sport.

On the other hand, it should not be concealed that undertaking this challenge has been a human experience, from which interdisciplinary work and scientific co-involvement have been experienced as a path of personal complicity. After all, science only partially exists in an unpolluted form. It cannot – and probably should not – escape from the environment in which it takes place, both in its more contextual and social dimension, and even in the purely biographical dimension of the researchers who, in the end, are the ones who practice it.

Having completed this task, the only thing left to do is to present the proposal, which must be understood in the literal sense. The following lines do not pretend to resolve to its ultimate consequences the profuse interweaving that links communication and sport. They do not even aspire to seal some modest areas of it, assuming that science, any discipline, is worthy of aspiring to conclusively seal anything it examines. It is only intended here to open a broad panorama, a potential “status questionis”, about the situation in which this subject is found, to raise possible lines of investigation and to establish facts, solidly objective. It does not cease to aspire to offer a glimpse into the future of research linking communication and sport, which is destined to have a significant development. At least that is the conclusion that can be drawn after the approach provided by these pages and that now is in some way advanced.

Naturally, being at a starting point almost necessarily implies contemplating, even if it is on the immediate horizon, the following stages that will be necessary to continue this path, while at the same time making it possible to narrow it down. In this direction, and always within exploratory inquiries, it seems prudent to continue addressing the semiotic dynamics of sport in relation to the construction of social imaginaries and the use of verbal language, as well as its social projection, especially within the framework of technological innovation and the current mass media. Thus, from the outset, this work is aware that it is framed in potentially larger coordinates, which would ultimately end up outlining a research program. Or at least that is our purpose; it is also our illusion. We cannot conclude without our gratitude to the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Almeria (Spain) for funding part of the publication of this research.

F. García Marcos P. García Mateo

Almeria, autumn 2023