Iniesta passed and Messi finished clinically : Football verbs and transitivity

Football language, like other special languages, is not only of lexical interest. It is also special by virtue of various syntactic and semantic features, related to the situational context of football. Two areas of verb syntax, involving transitivity, are in focus: the omissibility of certain contextually recoverable “football objects” (e.g. Iniesta passed [the ball], Messi finished [the attack]) and the occurrence of “unconventional” objects of certain verbs (e.g. Their third goal killed the match, Manchester United sold Ronaldo to Real Madrid). Thus, like other special subject areas, football creates its own semanticpragmatic framework, paving the way for constructions and collocations that deviate from those applying in general language.


Introduction
Football, or soccer, has long been the most popular and widespread sport on earth, variously referred to as the "people's game" and the "world's game" (e.g.Walvin 1994, Murray 1996, Harvey 2005).Its global status, in minds and media, extends far beyond the world of sports -it is also a mass and pop cultural phenomenon of rare proportions. 1 This implies that football language, broadly defined as the repertoire of expressive means and registers used for communicating about football, is arguably the world's biggest "special language" (cf.Sager et al. 1981:63ff.).At the same time, due to the vast number of people interested in football worldwide (cf.Goldblatt 2007:x), media coverage, etc., it may be considered, to a considerable extent, a public language, thus part of "general language". 2In this article, however, our main focus is on the specialness of football language, relating to certain aspects of its verb syntax. 3 To be sure, special languages are perceived as such mainly owing to their technical vocabulary (Sager et al. 1981:230), football language being no exception (cf.terms like sidefoot, offside, one-two and set piece): "[t]he language of football is first and foremost terminology" (Lavric 2008:5).However, special languages may also exhibit characteristic grammatical features, e.g. with regard to article usage, nominalisations, etc., usually less conspicuous than special terminology.
One typical feature of football language relates to verb usage.The example in the title provides two instances of this: the use of the verbs pass and finish.First of all, we may note that for someone totally unfamiliar with football language, even the basic meaning of the example sentence, i.e. a goal being scored, would likely be shrouded in mystery.At the lexical level, both pass and finish have special "football" meanings (enhanced by the seemingly odd collocation finished clinically), distinguishing them from general language, in itself a demonstration of the specialness of football language; this, of course, is not unique to pass and finish. 4Syntactically, the verbs in question behave in a no less special way, related to their lexical properties.In the example sentence, the verb pass has, as it were, an implicitly transitive function.Contrary to the "normal" intransitive use of pass, it does not mean that Iniesta just walked or ran by, but that he delivered the ball from a certain distance, by kicking it, to Messi.The ball, however, is not mentioned, 2 For discussion of the relations between football language, sports language and general language, see Bergh & Ohlander (2012a:14ff.).Cf. also Beard (1998), Svensén (2009:71f.)and Sager et al. (1981:68): "There is no absolute borderline between general and special language". 3In comparison with the plethora of academic studies on historical, sociological and cultural aspects of football (cf.Russell 1997:1f.), the language of the game may be described as under-researched (Lavric 2008:5).On the other hand, there are several books (e.g.Leith 1997, Seddon 2004) dealing with "football talk", "footballese", "soccerese", etc., from a popular cultural rather than linguistic perpective, often with a focus on jargon and clichés (cf.also Morris 1981:298ff.), but certainly testifying to the public interest in some noticeable features of, e.g., football commentary and match reports. 4Another well-known example of verbs taking on special "football" meanings is dive in the rough sense of 'fall to the ground, pretending to have been fouled', as in Diving is one of the biggest problems in today's football.
only contextually implied, like Messi, the recipient of the pass (cf.Iniesta passed the ball to Messi).Similarly, the verb finish, normally a transitive verb, appears to lack an object while, nonetheless, referring to an act of goal scoring by Messi.In this case, the "understood" or "missing" object is not the ball (cf.*Messi finished the ball), but rather something more vague or abstract, such as the attack. 5 Object omission, however, is not the only special verb usage to be found in football language.There are other types of special or "unconventional" verb behaviour related to transitivity, often involving violation of "normal" selectional constraints, as illustrated in expressions such as kill the match and rest a player.Such verb usage will also be dealt with in due course.
Although our principal focus will be on English, we shall have occasion to consider some relevant examples of parallel usage concerning Swedish football verbs; for instance, the title example translates literally into perfectly idiomatic "football Swedish": Iniesta passade och Messi avslutade kliniskt.It should be added that far from all of the special verb usage discussed in the following pages is exclusive to football language.In fact, similar usage may be found in other types of sports language, especially -but not only -in other ball sports (cf.Bergh & Ohlander 2012a:16f.).
Before we go on to consider verb usage in football language in some more depth, something should be said about the notion of transitivity in so far as it relates to our further discussion of certain football verbs.

Transitive and intransitive verb use
The traditional distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, closely related to notions such as complementation and valency, lies at the very core of English verb syntax.In the words of Quirk et al. (1985:53), transitive verbs "are followed by an object", as in Iniesta passed the ball, whereas intransitive verbs "are followed by no 5 The examples used in this study are for the most part edited examples from extensive web searches.For example, the verb pass, used intransitively with an omitted object (ball), occurs (among thousands of others) in the following examples: ... just stood there and watched as Iniesta passed to Messi, Iniesta passed the ball to Messi on the edge of the box; cf. also Messi finished clinically from an Andres Iniesta through ball.
obligatory element", as in Iniesta passed (cf.also, e.g., Sweet 1891:89f., Biber et al. 1999:141).As pointed out by Huddleston & Pullum (2002:216), the notion of transitivity is often more usefully applied to verb use than to verbs as such, since not all verbs are either transitive or intransitive: "although faint is always intransitive many verbs can occur either with or without an object.For example, read is intransitive in She read and transitive in She read the letter" (cf.Jespersen 1924:158, Quirk et al. 1985:1169).In a similar vein, Biber et al. (1999:147) note: "It is striking that a lot of English verbs have both transitive and intransitive uses", pass being a prime example.Incidentally, this also applies to Swedish verbs (SAG 2:535).As is well known, a special transitiveintransitive relationship holds for ergative -or dual-transitivity -verbs: Joe opened the door versus The door opened (cf.Biber et al. 1999:147, Huddleston & Pullum 2002:217). 6Such verbs, however, will not be further considered here, nor -with one or two exceptions -shall we be concerned with Quirk et al's (1985:54) distinction between monotransitive, ditransitive and complex transitive verbs.Thus, when we speak about transitive versus intransitive use of football verbs, what we refer to are monotransitive verbs, i.e. verbs with one object, as in Iniesta passed [the ball] and Messi finished [the attack]. 7 Of special relevance to our present purposes is the omission -or, rather, omissibility -of objects under specific circumstances, a wellknown aspect of some, but not all, transitive verbs.Why, for example, is it that the same object (the ball) is omissible in Iniesta passed the ball to Messi but not in Barcelona possessed the ball for 72% of the match?
From an overall communicative perspective, omission of objects -or indeed any linguistic element -can be seen as a special exponent of a general principle of expressive economy, underlying various types of ellipsis, along the lines of: "Do not say more than you have to for the message to get across!" 8 To ensure communicative clarity, however, it 6 Sweet (1891:90) calls this class of verbs "passival": "their grammatical subject is logically their direct object, as in the book sells well". 7In a valency context, such verbs are often referred to as (one type of) "two-place verbs", co-occurring with a subject and another clause element (cf.Biber et al. (1999:141, 147). 8Cf."Zipf's Law", embodying the "principle of least effort" (Zipf 1949).From a pragmatic perspective, object omission may be seen as a syntactic reflection of Grice's well-known "maxim of quantity", implying (second sub-maxim) that one should avoid being more informative than necessary (Levinson 1983:101).Cf. also Jespersen's can only be applied as long as the omitted element can be identified, or "recovered", one way or another.Commenting on ellipsis, Halliday (1967:206) notes that "what is left unsaid cannot be otherwise than taken for granted."Similarly, in a critical aside on grammarians' tendency to overuse their "panacea", ellipsis, Jespersen (1924:307) admonishes grammarians to be "wary in admitting ellipses except where there can be no doubt as to what is understood."More specifically, Sweet (1891:90) notes that "transitive verbs can [...] stand without any object-noun [...] when [it] may be understood from the context" (cf.Quirk et al. 1985Quirk et al. :1169)).A typical example of this is the phrase Stand and deliver!, as ordered by highwaymen and brigands in the old days of (original) highway robbery.The normally transitive verb deliver may here occur without an object since the context clarifies, unequivocally, what should be delivered, i.e. the travellers' money and valuables.Interestingly, objectless deliver is also common in present-day English as a metaphorical expression, although in other contexts, as in The team (government) failed to deliver, where the goods is usually the understood object (cf.e.g.LDOCE: deliver).Huddleston & Pullum (2002:301) discuss the sentence They won.They argue that the intransitive use of win here is "interpreted as 'win a contest', and which contest it was can be determined from the context."In such cases, further, "the omission of the object ... is restricted to particular verbs."Thus, there appear to be certain idiosyncratic lexical constraints at work, permitting some verbs, but not others, to drop their objects in certain contexts.Along the same lines, Biber et al. (1999:147) speak about "object-deleting verbs", i.e. verbs such as paint, write, drive, drink, eat, read.Quirk et al. (1985:722f.), describing the transitiveintransitive relation as one of "conversion", distinguish between, among others, the following types of object omission: (a) "A specific object is understood from the situational context", e.g.Don't touch!; (b) "A nonspecific object is semantically entailed", e.g.They can't spell.(For Swedish, cf.SAG 3:297.)Especially the first type of omission is highly (1924:309) discussion of "suppression", akin to Grice's quantity maxim: "we suppress a great many things which it would be pedantic to say expressly"; "Only bores want to express everything, but even bores find it impossible to express everything."For a more technical, in-depth perspective on "null-complement phenomena", i.e. omissions, see Ruppenhofer & Michaelis (2014).
relevant as regards certain intransitively used football verbs.This is illustrated in the title example -but note that somebody completely ignorant of even the basics of football, thus unable to associate the example with a game of football, would be at a loss to identify the missing objects of the verbs passed and finished.At the same time, as mentioned in section 1, omitted objects may vary in "precision", in general language as well as in football language.Consequently, they are not always uniquely recoverable: "the object idea [may be] so vague or uncertain that it is not necessary or easy [...] to express it" (Sweet 1891:90).
From a communicative perspective, the basic point of the above discussion is the recoverability of the omitted object, which, in turn, is dependent on a variety of linguistic, contextual and situational factors, as well as background knowledge.This can be illustrated by the most basic of all ball-sport verbs, i.e. play.A sentence like They played beautifully is, in isolation, multiply ambiguous, its full interpretation heavily dependent on context.If uttered after a game of football, the verb played will have football, or the game, as its self-evident "understood" object.If uttered after, say, a concert, played will have another, equally selfevident missing object, i.e. music, concert, violin, etc.Each subject field, or event, thus creates its own contextual and situational conditions for object omission.In a way, two different -but polysemous -verbs play, each with its own set of omissible objects, could be said to be involved in the different interpretations. 9The kind of inferencing required for a full interpretation of They played beautifully in different contexts and situations is part of any communicatively competent speaker's language ability.From another angle, unless the "missing" object is recoverable, the message will be incomprehensible or blurred -expressive economy at the expense of communicative clarity.
Let us proceed to another aspect of transitivity, involving the nature of objects that may co-occur with specific verbs, thus of clear relevance to certain transitive football verbs.Just as verbs may have certain restrictions concerning what type of subject they can take (e.g.animate versus inanimate), there may also be restrictions concerning type of object (cf.Quirk et al. 1985:771f., Biber et al. 1999:378).For example, the football verb kick requires an animate, human subject (i.e. a player) and (normally, barring a foul) a concrete, inanimate object (i.e.ball) -cf.Messi kicked the ball versus *The ball kicked Messi.The same applies to the football verb pass (Iniesta passed the ball), as opposed to the "ordinary" verb pass, which is why the sentence The ball passed Iniesta ('The ball went past Iniesta'), unlike *The ball kicked Messi, is fully grammatical; the general-language verb pass has a different meaning and different selectional restrictions from those of the homonymous football verb. 10uirk et al. (1985:1176) divide monotransitive verbs into "semantic groups, according to the kinds of subject and object that they take".Among these are verbs with "[t]ypically animate subject + typically concrete object", e.g.carry and clean, and verbs with "[t]ypically animate subject + typically animate object", e.g.admire and kill.The word "typically" in these formulations is important, indicating that verbs may often belong to more than one category, i.e. that boundaries between categories tend to be blurred.For example, the verb kill typically takes an animate object (to kill somebody), whereas buy and sell normally take inanimate objects (to buy/sell something).In football language, however, these verbs often take "unconventional" objects: kill may co-occur with an inanimate object, buy and sell with human objects (see section 4).As will be seen, such apparent violations of selection restrictions often involve a transition from literal to metaphorical meaning (cf.Chomsky 1965:149, Quirk et al. 1985:772).

Omission of football objects
As emphasized in the previous section, object omission can only take place under the condition of recoverability, where contextual factors play a dominant role.One such factor is the overall conceptual framework, or semantic sphere, characteristic of different subject fields and, consequently, of special languages.The conceptual framework of football, and football language, is characterized by notions such as 'play', 'game', 'win', 'lose', 'goal', 'ball', 'shoot', 'pass', 'save', 'attack'.Knowledge of football's conceptual framework is thus a necessary requirement for the proper identification of missing objects in football language; the same applies to the special languages of other subject fields.Also, object omission within a special subject field may be at least partially genre-or register-dependent (cf. Ferguson 1983, Müller 2008).According to Ruppenhofer & Michaelis (2010:163f.), stressing "the connection between genres and argument omission", "certain genres license object omissions that are otherwise permitted only in generichabitual contexts", match reports being mentioned as one such genre.Further, live match reporting may, due to time pressure, give rise to a higher frequency of omitted objects than, say, a post-match analysis of a game.
Let us briefly return to the football verb pass, as used in the title example (Iniesta passed).We have already noted that the understood missing object of passed can only be the ball, uniquely identified by the football context.Put differently, object deletion in this case -converting pass from a transitive to an intransitive verb -is made possible by the football context.This may be compared with the unacceptability in general language of freely omitting the object of pass as a transitive verb.At the breakfast table, for example, an imperative sentence like *Pass, please would be incomprensible: it could never be interpreted as the intransitive (objectless) equivalent of, e.g., Pass the butter, please.There are many things on a breakfast table that may be passed (bread, butter, jam, etc.) -on the football pitch, there is only one: the ball.In other words, the breakfast context does not enable object omission with pass; the football context does, meeting the requirement of recoverability.
In view of the fact that, for players and spectators alike, the ball is at the very centre of attention for (at least) 90 minutes during a game of football, it is hardly surprising that it is often omitted with various football verbs, among them pass.Below are some other examples, of varying frequency, of football verbs with ball as the omitted object, starting with verbs relating to the actions of outfield players, as often heard and seen in football reports and commentary: 11 At this point, a few comments of general relevance should be made.First of all, in the above examples, ball may be regarded as the prototypically omitted object, not as the only, uniquely recoverable one.In some -but not all -of the examples, other omitted objects are equally conceivable, such as shot in connection with verbs like clear and strike.For these and many other verbs (e.g.sidefoot and head), there is no clear semantic difference between ball versus shot as omitted objects; for goalkeeping verbs such as save, the understood object may also be conceived as, e.g., free kick or penalty. 11Ruppenhofer & Michaelis (2010:164), discussing omitted objects, note that they are "entities that are not only mutually identifiable to speaker and hearer but also a current joint focus of attention, e.g.[...] the ball in the match-report genre." 12Cf.Messi quickly recovered [from his injury] to produce an epic comeback, where recovered has its usual general-language meaning. 13Cf. the following piece of wordplay on a banner at a football match, as observed by Morris (1981:301): Jesus saves but Smith nets the rebounds.
Further, as regards semantic roles, ball as object typically appears in "agent-patient clauses [and] expresses the patient role" (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:245), i.e. the "affected" role in the terminology of, e.g., Quirk et al. (1985:741) and Biber et al. (1999:127).As we shall see presently, this is not always the case with omissible football objects.
It should also be stressed that not all transitive football verbs may occur, with equal ease, without an object.For example, the football verb par excellence, kick, whose self-evident object is normally the ball (occasionally, less normally, a player in the opposition).Nonetheless, kick does not readily permit object omission, as evidenced by the rarity (as confirmed by web searches) of, e.g., ?She kicked into the net instead of She kicked the ball into the net, in contrast to the perfectly normal She shot (fired, sidefooted, struck, backheeled, etc.) into the net.; the same goes for ?She hit into the net for She hit the ball into the net.Interestingly, the verb deliver -which often occurs without an object in general language (cf.section 2) -apparently does not gladly part from its object (ball) in football language: ?*TheVilla striker delivered into the penalty box -as opposed to the common intransitive general-language use: Arsenal didn't deliver.Likewise, the stative verb possess -central to the notion of "possession football" -does not normally occur without ball in tow: cf.Barcelona possessed the ball for more than 70 per cent of the match -*Barcelona possessed for more than ... (but: Barcelona dominated for 90 minutes; cf.below).
Thus, as noted earlier, there appear to be various idiosyncratic lexical constraints determining the omissibility of objects in football language (and not only there; cf.section 2).Despite similar meaning, individual verbs may behave differently in this respect -often a matter of relative rather than absolute preference.This should be kept in mind as we consider some other omitted objects below.Another point worth mentioning is that some verbs may occur freely without an accompanying adverbial (cf.She shot and the keeper saved), whereas others seem to prefer the company of an adverbial, indicating manner or location/direction (cf.He curled wide versus ?He curled).This also applies to certain other football verbs, as will be seen below.
With regard to Swedish, the corresponding football verbs tend to behave in roughly the same way as the English ones exemplified above, permitting the omission of bollen ('the ball') in similar contexts: Marta sköt hårt (cf.Marta shot hard), Ibrahimovic nickade i mål (cf. Ibrahimovic headed home), Hart räddade (cf.Hart saved) -but hardly ?Hon sparkade i mål (cf.?She kicked into the net).It thus appears that English and Swedish football verbs share the same basic principles and similar lexical constraints governing the omissibility of objects (cf.SAG 3:297, Bäckström 2013).
Alongside ball, one of the most frequently omitted football objects is goal, exemplified below: As already emphasized, alternative missing objects are often conceivable in connection with football verbs, save being a case in point; the verb net may also occur with ball as a missing object: She netted [the ball] confidently from the penalty spot.Another example is miss, which may take chance or opportunity as its omissible object.By contrast, the verbs score and concede often take equalizer ('equalizing goal') as their object: Milan scored (conceded) an equalizer just before half-time.In this sentence, however, the object cannot be omitted on the model of goal.From the sentence Milan scored (conceded), the object goal is automatically recoverable, being, as it were, "built into" the football senses of score and concede as an entailment relation (see e.g.Lyons 1977:788f., Levinson 1983:174, Cruse 1986:14); by contrast, equalizer is not recoverable, being semantically too specific to be entailed by score and concede.The fact that the missing object may be interpreted as an equalizer, given the right contextual and situational circumstances (in particular, the score at the moment of the utterance), is a different matter.In parallel fashion, also depending on context, the verb shoot may occasionally be perceived as having goal as its missing object.From a sentence such as Messi shot from the edge and equalized Barcelona, a goal may be inferred, but only thanks to the co-occurrence of and equalized Barcelona -on its own, the phrase shot from the edge says nothing about the result of Messi's effort.In this respect, then, shoot contrasts with the verbs score and concede, where goal is always the built-in, uniquely recoverable object: cf.Ronaldo scored versus Ronaldo shot.
Compared to Swedish, the most notable difference is that the normal Swedish equivalents of score and concede, with omitted objects, are expressions where the object, i.e. mål ('goal'), is retained: göra (ett) mål (cf.Engl.make a goal) and släppa in ett mål (cf.Engl.let in a goal).Corresponding to objectless score, there is also the intransitive verb näta (cf.Engl.net), as well as its somewhat facetious synonym måla; however, these verbs are nowhere near as frequent as göra mål.
In connection with, in particular, the verbs score and concede, with reverse meanings, the absence of an object, i.e. goal, naturally means that it cannot be modified; this, of course, applies to all missing objects.Instead, in some cases, the verb itself may be modified by an adverbial.For example, Arsenal scored (conceded) a last-minute goal is equivalent to Arsenal scored (conceded) in the last minute; cf. also Walcott scored a glorious goal -Walcott scored gloriously, City conceded two goals in ten minutes -City conceded twice in ten minutes.However, this expedient does not always seem to be available, restricting the possibility of object omission, not only in football language. 14rom a semantic point of view, goal as an omissible object tends to differ from ball: cf.score [a goal] versus pass [a ball].While ball is usually assigned the semantic role of "patient" or "affected" (cf.above), goal mostly involves the outcome of the verb action, what Jespersen (1924:159f.) and others (e.g., Quirk et al. 1985:749f., Biber et al. 1999:127) refer to as "object of result" or "resultant object". 15This type of object is at its most obvious with verbs like score and concede; less so with save.From a wider perspective, the semantic-role contrast between ball and goal can be seen as a reflection of the different functions of the ball and the goal in the game of football, where the ball serves as the prerequisite means to a certain end, i.e. scoring goals.
The omitted objects so far discussed -ball, shot and goal -may be characterized as fairly specific, representing key elements in any game of football.However, omitted objects may also be of a more abstract or vague nature (cf.Sweet 1891:90).One such case was mentioned in section 1, in connection with the verb finish in the title example (Messi finished clinically), used intransitively.It was argued that the omitted object, part of the semantic make-up of this football use of finish, is attack: Messi finished the attack clinically.This kind of omitted object is clearly a shade less specific than, e.g., ball. 16 similar kind of rather imprecise omissible object is opposition, often in connection with the verb attack: From the first minute PSG attacked [the opposition] relentlessly.As always, the object may be more varied when not omitted, including the names of specific clubs: the opposition's goal (penalty box, defence, Chelsea, etc.).Incidentally, defend as a football verb may also be used intransitively: Liverpool defended well.Here, however, the omitted object is the corresponding reflexive pronoun; cf. the alternative Liverpool defended themselves well.Further, in contrast to verbs like attack, the transitive football verb beat (Arsenal beat Chelsea 2-0) never occurs without an object (*Arsenal beat 2-0); again, idiosyncratic lexical constraints seem to be in operation.
Interestingly, most of the corresponding Swedish football verbs (avsluta 'finish', anfalla 'attack', slå 'beat') behave in identical ways to the English ones just discussed with regard to the omissibility of objects.This also applies to the next group of omitted objects and their concomitant verbs.
For some verbs, the missing object is even more general than the ones mentioned so far, referring to the game of football itself.Earlier on (section 2), the noun football was mentioned as the understood object in the sentence They played [football] beautifully; cf.They played beautiful football.Other omissible objects, like game or match, are equally possible: They played [the game] beautifully.With some other verbssuch as win and lose, but also, e.g., dominate -game and match (but not football) are also readily omissible: The London side won (lost) [the game], Germany dominated [the match] throughout the first half.Incidentally, a more specific verb such as referee may also drop its object: Who refereed [the match]?-Pierluigi Collina.Naturally, more detailed objects -variants of game or match -are often conceivable, e.g., the Champions League final.
So far, our discussion of omitted objects in football language has concerned monotransitive verbs.In a few cases, however, a ditransitive or complex transitive verb may be involved.For example, the verb deny, usually taking both a direct and an indirect object (They denied him access) often turns up in football contexts: Julio Cesar denied Ronaldo brilliantly (cf.also the passive equivalent: R. was brilliantly denied by J.C.).Those familiar with football and English football language will know that the sentence refers to an excellent piece of goalkeeping by Julio Cesar, denying an opponent player a goal by making a brilliant save.In other words, the verb deny here functions as an action verb (cf.also the adverbial brilliantly, a seemingly odd collocate of deny), with an omitted direct object, i.e. goal. 17n even more conspicuous example of radical simplification in terms of omitted clause elements is provided by the verb convert.It is usually classified as a complex transitive verb (Quirk et. al 1985(Quirk et. al :53ff., 1200)), constructed with an object and/or a complement introduced by (in)to: They converted the sofa /into a bed/, They converted /to Catholicism/.As a football verb, however, convert may also be used "absolutely", without an object, in sentences like this: Özil was awarded a penalty but failed to convert.True, this frequent use of convert in football language, with neither an object nor a complement in place, looks superficially similar to the intransitive use of convert in, e.g., They converted (e.g. to Catholicism).At a deeper level, however, it is essentially different, being a syntactically abbreviated version of ... but failed to convert the penalty into goal.In other words, both the direct object (the penalty) and the complement (into goal) are conveniently omitted, recoverable from the immediate situational context -a striking gain in expressive economy, also illustrating the somewhat imprecise nature of the understood object (penalty, chance, opportunity, etc.).

Unconventional football objects
Apart from the omissibility of certain recoverable objects, discussed in the preceding section, football language may display its special character in other ways related to verb usage.For example, due to their special meaning, football verbs often co-occur with what may -from a generallanguage perspective -be seen as somewhat unexpected adverbials, e.g., finish clinically and deny brilliantly, as exemplified earlier.In this section, we shall consider another collocational aspect of football language (and, in many cases, sports language at large), namely the cooccurrence of certain verbs with objects that may be perceived as clearly unconventional in relation to general language, mainly in terms of infringements of "normal" selectional restrictions (cf.section 2).
Animacy is a well-known semantic feature, of considerable relevance to verbs and their patterns of co-occurrence with subjects and objects.For example, the verb kill prototypically takes an animate (agentive) subject as well as an animate (affected) object (John killed Bill, The lion killed the lamb).However, there are also less prototypical cases, by no means rare, such as The stone killed Bill and Curiosity killed the cat, with inanimate (instrumental) subjects (cf.Quirk et al. 1985:743, Biber et al. 1999:124).
In metaphorical usage, less prototypical objects may also occur, in general language as well as in football language.One such example is the well-known everyday expression to kill time, before boarding a plane, for instance.On the football pitch, the same expression often has a related but special meaning, referring to a sort of go-slow action, deliberately wasting time to prevent the opposing team from scoring: Spurs were trying to kill time towards the end of the game.The verb kill, with a special meaning, also turns up in other metaphorical football phrases, such as kill /off/ the match (game), as in Their third goal killed the match, i.e. decided the game for good, ahead of time. 18hus, the verb kill provides examples of football usage that deviates from general language by taking non-prototypical, inanimate objects, forcing a metaphorical interpretation (cf.Quirk et al. 1985:772).The same kind of usage is common in Swedish football language (Målet dödade matchen ('The goal killed the match').
The distinction between human and non-human (inanimate) football objects is relevant in many other cases.Some football verbs normally take human objects, reflecting events on the pitch, e.g. the roughly synonymous tackle and challenge: The defender cynically tackled him from behind. 19On the other hand, in general language, a verb like read typically takes inanimate objects, such as books and other reading matter.However, read may also, in metaphorical usage, take human objects, with the meaning of 'see through': She read him like an open book.This kind of use is also found in the context of football: The keeper read the penalty taker and was able to save.But read may also occur with nonhuman football objects: The keeper read the penalty (free kick, shot) and parried.
So far, the cases dealt with have mainly concerned instances of metaphorical usage, in which there are clear parallels between general language and football language but where football language may exhibit a range of objects specific to football.However, differences between general language and football language may be even more conspicuous.This applies not least to the converse verb pair buy and sell.Since the abolition of slavery, these verbs normally take only non-human objects in general-language contexts.In football language, however, examples like the following abound, especially during the so-called "silly season" when the "transfer window" is open for clubs to buy and sell players: The occurrence of a human object with verbs such as sell and buy, and purchase and trade, speaks volumes about today's football as big business.At a more general level, it demonstrates the close connection between linguistic phenomena and the "real" world, where changing conditions often give rise to changed usage.It may be added that, unsurprisingly, Swedish usage is here identical to English.Buying and selling players is a universal feature of international football (and professional sports at large), reflected in similar ways in the world's football languages.
Another group of football verbs involving the frequent -and, linguistically, perhaps more surprising -appearance of human objects includes examples such as the following: The Barcelona boss rested Suárez for the midweek game, Hodgson decided to play Rooney out on the left.
The most common use of rest as a general-language verb is intransitive: rest for two hours.When used transitively, its object is more often than not a part of the body: rest one's legs.In football language, however, it may also take a human object, i.e. a player, as illustrated in the first of the above sentences.The verb rest has a distinctly causative meaning (cf.Sweet 1891:90, Quirk et al. 1985: 745f.), its subject usually being the manager or coach of a team. 20This also applies to the verb play, which in general language, when used transitively, does not normally take human objects.In a football context, however, play often takes a player as its object, with a meaning opposite that of rest, as exemplified in the second sentence. 21It is notable that the corresponding Swedish verbs -vila ('rest') and spela ('play') -can be used in the same causative way, with players as objects, a usage most likely inspired by the syntactic behaviour of the two English football verbs.
A similar use is displayed by the verb sign.In general language (cf.e.g.LDOCE: sign v), this verb may be used intransitively, with an understood object (Sign here, please), but more often transitively, with inanimate objects (one's name, a contract, etc.).In football language, sign may also take a human object, like buy and sell: "I nearly signed Ibrahimovic," admits Wenger.The example can be seen as a convenient shorthand for "I nearly made Ibrahimovic sign a contract (with Arsenal)".Thus, the behaviour of sign is yet another example of causative verb use in football language, where a player turns up as the 20 A similar, causative use of rest, with patient as object, may be found in medical language: Rest the patient for 10-15 minutes in a supine position.In football language, this use of rest is more or less synonymous with the verb bench: Enrique benched Suárez for the midweek game; cf also: drop a player. 21The verb play also occurs with certain other, special football objects, e.g.play the offside trap (defence tactics), play the advantage (refereeing).
(superficial) object, corresponding to the subject in Ibrahimovic signed (the contract). 22Here, too, Swedish usage has followed suit, to the point of importing the verb sign as a direct loan (sajna): Real Madrid är på gång att sajna den kinesiske mittfältaren Lin Liangming ('R.M. are on their way to signing the Chinese midfielder L.L'). 23umming up, this section has focused on some different types of unconventional football objects, where the common denominator has been the violation of what may be seen as the "normal" selectional restrictions of certain verbs; from a general-language perspective, such infringements often give rise to superficially odd collocations.In some cases, they may result in metaphorical usage (e.g., The third goal killed the match).In others, the unconventional objects may be due to the occurrence of human instead of inanimate objects of certain verbs: players may be rested, bought and sold, as well as signed -reflecting, in a way, their status as almost dehumanized commodities in the heavily commercialized world of football.

Concluding remarks
The overall purpose of this article has been to argue that football language, like other special languages, is not merely a matter of lexical interest.Certainly, terminology remains at the core of all special languages as its most easily recognized characteristic.However, as we have attempted to show here, football language is also special by virtue of certain syntactic and semantic features having to do with transitivity, related to the situational context of football as well as to certain specific football-related genres, such as match reports and commentary.
Our focus has been on two areas of verb syntax, setting football language apart from general language: the omission -for reasons of expressive economy -of certain contextually recoverable "football objects" (ball, shot, goal, etc.) and the occurrence of "unconventional" objects (e.g., human objects of verbs such as buy, sell, rest and play).To be sure, our exemplification and discussion can lay no claim to being exhaustive -for example, the idiosyncratic lexical constraints that seem to determine the relative propensity of football verbs to omit objects are clearly in need of further elucidation.Still, we hope to have demonstrated that football language is indeed a rewarding field of syntactic-semantic inquiry, well worth in-depth exploration; this may also, as a side-effect, shed some further light on classic areas in syntax, semantics and pragmatics.In particular, the phenomena discussed here illustrate the close relationship between language and reality, not least the relevance of contextual and situational settings for syntactic form, selectional restrictions and collocations.
In closing, we would like to repeat that the examples discussed in this article are by no means unique to football language; many of themconcerning both omissible and unconventional objects -could also relate to other ball sports, or to sports language at large.More generally, all special subject areas tend to create their own contextual framework, involving a specific semantic-pragmatic sphere.This, in turn, paves the way for constructions and collocations that may deviate considerablyeven spectacularly -from those applying in general language, thus helping to distinguish special languages from general language.Football language, it appears, is an obvious case in point.

shoot:
Marta shot [the ball] hard past the keeper to make it 3-1 sidefoot: Rooney calmly sidefooted [the ball] into the bottom corner strike: Ronaldo struck [the ball] powerfully into the back of the net fire: Neymar fired [the ball] over the bar from 18 yards backheel: The Celtic defender clumsily backheeled [the ball] into his own net clear: Terry cleared [the ball] miraculously just off the line cross: Pirlo crossed [the ball] into the penalty area curl: Beckham curled [the ball] wide head: Ibrahimovic headed [the ball] home for 2-2 collect: The midfielder collected [the ball] and shot from the edge of the box play: The Real striker needlessly played [the ball] back to the midfield recover: The Liverpool defender recovered [the ball] and passed to Milner 12 Goalkeepers, as opposed to outfield players, are associated with, e.g., the following verbs: save: Hart saved [the ball] from point-blank range 13 parry: Casillas was alert and parried [the ball] to safety tip: Neuer heroically tipped [the ball] on to the bar fist: The keeper fisted [the ball] away

score:
Chelsea scored [a goal] again on the half-hour net: The West Ham youngster finally netted [a goal] miss: Kane missed [the goal] but scored the rebound to put Spurs ahead save: The keeper saved [the goal] with her foot to keep Japan in the game concede: Milan conceded [a goal] just before the half-time whistle defend: The visitors defended [their goal] bravely for a full 90 minutes Real Madrid bought (purchased) Ronaldo from Manchester United in 2009 Manchester United sold Ronaldo to Real Madrid in 2009 Manchester United lost a number of fans when they traded Ronaldo to Madrid