ESports Commentary in Dota 2 Sphere: Expressive Means and Corpus Aspect

The work is devoted to the consideration of such a genre as eSports commentary, which has apparently received little scholarly attention because of its novelty. Stylistic figures in Dota 2 eSports commentators’ speech mainly concern us from a scientific perspective since they frequently occur there and seem to to be completely unexplored. Quantitative and qualitative content analysis of means enabled us to analyze stylistic figures functioning in commentators’ speech, while a questionnaire allowed us to evaluate their role in enhancing speech expressiveness. Besides, the fact that specific corpus of eSports oral speech still does not exist encouraged us to address corpus creation task. Thus, transcription and annotation problems previously raised by prominent scholars appeared to us in a different light. The first aspect of the work presents the results of the analysis of 4 kinds of stylistic figures which include their frequencies, functions and perlocutionary effects in commentators’ language. Stylistic figures of placement and addition were acknowledged to be the most frequent types. In the second aspect of the work, we present the transcripted and annotated material with the speech of 14 commentators, the course of transcription and annotation procedures and the description of the potential corpus of oral speech of a Russian-speaking eSports commentator. Our work may encourage specialists and young scholars to enlarge a potential corpus and conduct more еSports commentators' language research discovering new facts and facing new issues.