Functional Models of Elementary Discursive Units in Russian Esports Commentary

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the issue of the local structure modeling of the eSports commentary spoken genre on an example of the Dota 2 computer discipline. ESports commentary is a spontaneous and creative speech aimed at describing of what is happening on the computer-gaming field. The main factors that force us to study it are the high popularity, the influencing nature of speech, as well as the lack of scientific attention. A theoretical and methodological framework of the study contains the elements of the structural and cognitivediscursive approaches in linguistics. The key research methods are language modeling, analysis of the local discourse structure in the cognitive perspective and quantitative analysis with regard to the corpus-based approach. The statistics were calculated for the sample with the total volume of 41 minutes and 30 seconds. The speeches belong to 14 Russian eSports commentators; they were delivered in 2017–2019. As a result, we have obtained a set of relevant patterns that represent characteristics of typical elementary discursive units (syntagmas) in the Dota 2 eSports commentary. These include a quick pronouncing, boundary pauses absence, frequent nuclear accent presence and embodiment of nouns and verbs. One part of the statistics represents general features of the Russian spoken discourse and human consciousness (e. g. the frequent use of absolute pauses); the other part correlate with a specificity of the situation in which the commentary is produced (e. g. the frequent use of short structures).