Linguistic Patterns of the Coach as a Factor in Building Wrestler's Competitive Confidence: A Psycholinguistic Approach

Abstract

This article explores the role of verbal interaction within the coach’s discourse as a key factor in shaping an athlete’s competitive confidence in the context of freestyle wrestling. The relevance of the study lies in the need to reconceptualize the communicative component of the sports process, where the coach’s words serve not only an instructive but also a psychoregulatory function. Within an interdisciplinary framework, the study analyzes recurring verbal patterns (linguistic patterns) used by coaches, taking into account their semantic, prosodic, and situational features.

Based on a functional classification - supportive, mobilizing, instructive, and destructive - the research identifies regularities in the impact of these patterns on the wrestler’s emotional and cognitive state under competitive pressure. The psycholinguistic mechanism of influence is interpreted through the prism of cognitive processing under stress, where the coach’s utterance operates as a trigger of affective activation or as a block to confidence, with direct behavioral implications.

The study proposes a conceptual model of strategic coach communication, structured according to phases of the competition process  –  preparatory, active, and reflexive. Methodological guidelines are formulated for enhancing coaches’ language competence, including principles of verbal ecology, intonational literacy, construction of adaptive linguistic patterns, and implementation of tools for reflective analysis of verbal interaction. The proposed model has strong potential for integration into coach education systems, particularly in sports demanding high psychological resilience.

The findings possess both theoretical and applied significance for the fields of sports pedagogy, psychology, and psycholinguistics, and they open new avenues for research at the intersection of humanities and applied sciences.