Communicative behavior of subjects in combat sports discourse in the USA and Russia

This article is devoted to the study of combat sports discourse. The aim of the study is to examine the communication between fighters, trainers, referees and fans during a sports match in English and Russian. The research methods are observation, audio-visual analysis of video recordings and discourse analysis. We have identified and described the most important characteristics of combat sports discourse: a great number of directive speech acts; expressive speech, characterized by markers of high emotional arousal; and a significant role of nonverbal communication. We also considered genre characteristics of a sport event, such as localization, features of communicative roles assumed by the subjects of communication, their communicative goals, the regulation of communicative contributions with the rules of sports competitions, etc.