Comparative Analysis of the Speech of Sports Commentators in the Russian and Anglophone Cultures

Sports commentary is a type of sports discourse that often attracts attention of renowned scholars in different spheres of science. The topic touches upon not only linguistic characteristics but also cultural, since in different countries each sports commentator is emotional in his own way, uses his lexical and syntactic means, professional terminology, pauses in speech, etc. This paper focuses on the peculiarities in the speech of sports football commentators: Russian and British. The key research method is comparative analysis of TV video materials of recorded football matches that are commented by Russian and English-speaking broadcasters. It is expected to find that British commentators are less emotional and expressive in their speech than Russian ones. Moreover, the main differences between the commentators of the two countries are highlighted and the communicative types of each of them are determined.