Horse-directed vocalizations : Clicks, trills, and /ho:/

Reed, Beatrice Szczepek (2025) Horse-directed vocalizations : Clicks, trills, and /ho:/. Language & Communication, 100. pp. 25-45.

Abstract

The study investigates horse-directed vocalizations in English and German. A corpus of human-horse activities contains clicks, trills, and variants of /ho:/. Horse-directed vocalizations show much phonetic and prosodic variation, which makes them adjustable to local interactional contexts. The largest group are clicks (lateral, dental, bilabial), which are used to ask horses to move faster. Trills (bilabial, alveolar) optionally end in alveolar stops. Their duration, intonation, and overall pitch vary considerably. German and English speakers use trills for opposite interactional purposes (slowing down vs. speeding up). /ho:/-type vocalizations vary with regard to first consonants, vowels, final consonants, duration, and intonation. /ho:/-variants are used to calm and/or slow horses down. Unlike non-lexical vocalizations in human talk, horse-directed vocalizations have specific, conventionalized meanings.