Approaches to Videogame Discourse

Lexis, Interaction, Textuality

Astrid Ensslin, Isabel Balteiro, Astrid Ensslin, Isabel Balteiro

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501375446
• eBook ISBN: 9781501338465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

The first significant collection of research in videogame linguistics, Approaches to Videogame Discourse features an international array of scholars in linguistics and communication studies exploring lexis, interaction and textuality in digital games.

In the first section, "Lexicology, Localisation and Variation," chapters cover productive processes surrounding gamer slang (ludolects), creativity and borrowing across languages, as well as industry-, genre-, game- and player-specific issues relating to localization, legal jargon and slang. "Player Interactions" moves on to examine communicative patterns between videogame players, focusing in particular on (un)collaborative language, functions and negotiations of impoliteness and issues of power in player discourse. In the final section, "Beyond the 'Text'," scholars grapple with issues of multimodality, paratextuality and transmediality in videogames in order to develop and enrich multimodal theory, drawing on key concepts from ludonarratology, language ideology, immersion and transmedia studies.

With implications for meaningful game design and communication theory, Approaches to Videogame Discourse examines in detail how video games function as means and objects of communication; how they give rise to new vocabularies, textual genres and discourse practices; and how they serve as rich vehicles of ideological signification and social engagement.

PART ONE

Lexicology, Localization, Variation

1

Videogames

A Lexical Approach

Carola Álvarez-Bolado and Inmaculada Álvarez de Mon

1 Introduction

When we first came across the lexis of videogames years ago, we were actually looking for specialized texts on new technologies and the internet to be used in the ESL (English as a second language) classroom with our engineering students at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). On that occasion, we were trying to select technical texts in Spanish that could serve as a reference of the kind of vocabulary the students would encounter in similar texts in English. Among the different kinds of passages selected with that teaching purpose in mind, we found videogame reviews published in CiberPaís, the supplement on new technologies and the internet of EL PAÍS, Spain’s largest newspaper. When trying to decide whether to include some videogame technical vocabulary in our selection, the lexis we found in those reviews surprised us. We had expected to find abundant computer terminology, but our findings were rather unexpected instead: the texts did certainly include specialized terms, but there were also characters, stories, missions, enemies, adventures, and avatars. In addition to videogame engines, polygons, and graphics, we could read about spells and secret codes, designers and artists. That mixture of ludic, narrative, industrial, and technological elements made the lexis of videogames in Spanish one that was both surprising and attractive, and one that, to our view, deserved some academic attention.

For this reason, we decided to analyze videogame reviews with the aim of finding out more about the lexis used in them. We tried to establish if they were new words or already existing words in Spanish acquiring a different meaning, and if so, how the new meanings had originated and what kind of reality they described. In addition, the fact that CiberPaís included reports and analyses of new technologies other than videogame reviews allowed us to determine which words were exclusive to the videogame lexical domain by comparing the different genres present in the supplement. Fortunately, EL PAÍS was helpful enough to provide us with the corpus of CiberPaís and, as will be explained later, it also gave us the possibility of using a collection of reviews large enough to produce relevant results as well as consistent data on the lexis of videogames as a specific domain. This chapter shows the results of analyzing the aforementioned corpus over a period of 10 years.

When facing the analysis of the lexis of a domain from the point of view both of its specificity and its formal as well as semantic features, as it is the case with videogames, it seems relevant to clarify first the notion of neologism. This can refer to a newly created word; a word coming from another language, such as English; or one already existing in the language under analysis but with a different meaning. Since new advances require new denominations, the study of neologisms has been of special interest when it comes to the terminology of science and technology. It acquired great importance at the end of the twentieth century given the explosion of technological advances taking place in the fields of electronics and telecommunications (Álvarez de Mon 2006: 241–62), which made especially relevant the analysis of the creation of terminology in Spanish, as Aguado de Cea’s work in the field of computer science reveals (1995, 2006). Although traditionally any new word widely used is considered a neologism, neology is not a clear-cut concept, as evidenced by different authors (Rey 2005: 311–33; Cabré 1993: 450). In specialized terminology (Cabré 1993: 446), neology results in a new term, neonym, which refers to new denominations in specialized languages.

Algeo (1991: 2) refers to the question of identifying neologisms by stating that a new word can be either a word with a form that has never been seen or heard before or perhaps a preexisting form showing a new use:

The form of the word itself may be novel, a form that has not been seen in English … or the newness may lie in a novel use of an existing form. In the latter case, the novelty may be in what the word refers to … the word’s grammar … or even its relationship to those who use it.

As will be explained here, it is precisely the “newness” in the use of an existing form, that is, a word used with a new meaning in a different context, that we consider relevant for clarification. According to Rey (2005: 312), those words that are not strictly new but have acquired a new meaning are to be considered neologisms of meaning or neosemanticisms, as new meanings develop for already existing words in the language. This type of neologism, which is based on the distinction between formal and semantic neology, has also been applied to studies of neology in nonspecialized Spanish (Guerrero Ramos 1995: 24) and is present in the CiberPaís corpus designating some of the key concepts of the videogame domain. More recently, other concepts such as pseudo-anglicism, hybrid anglicism, and false anglicism have been used when studying the lexical input of English into European languages (Görlach 2001; Onysko 2007; Furiassi 2010).

Another crucial notion of our study is context, because it has allowed us to identify new meanings of the words under study and to determine the characteristics of the new concepts to which they refer. From a linguistic point of view, context has many features. In order to reach a definition and describe its importance in the identification of new meanings in the specialized corpus, this research has taken into account different approaches. Coseriu (1973: 230–33) defines context as the reality surrounding a linguistic sign, an act of speech, or a text. In British linguistics, the work of the anthropologist Malinowski led to Halliday’s (1978: 143) description of context as a situation and its components: field (content), tenor (relationship between speakers), and mode (channel or medium of communication). On the other hand, Miller (1999: 15) defines the situational context as the information “about the purposes and goals of the communicative interaction,” the topic context as “that depending on the domain of discourse,” and the local context as “information provided by words in the immediate neighborhood.” Context is also taken into account by relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 15), which describes it as “the set of premises used in interpreting an utterance.” More recently, Van Dijk’s (2009: 165) comments on context have added value to the debate. His view of contexts as “mental constructs of relevant aspects of social situations [that] influence what people say and especially how they do so,” thus determining lexical choice and syntax, is of special interest regarding the gaming experience and the circumstances which surround it. Notwithstanding their role as journalists, videogame reviewers are usually accomplished players who analyze and write about their own practice and skill when playing, which can have an impact on their selection of words when writing.

Finally, and still in connection with context, there is another key concept that was particularly convenient for our study of videogame lexis, that of collocation. Since Firth’s often-quoted statement “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth 1957: 11), usual combinations of words or lexical solidarities have remained a controversial idea. For the structural approach (Sinclair 1991: 65; Hunston 2002: 142; Francis 1993: 147), a collocation is determined by its structure and occurs in patterns, so its study should include grammar. However, lexical combinations are also an object o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Locating Videogames in Medium-specific, Multilingual Discourse Analyses
• Part One Lexicology, Localization, Variation
• Part Two Player Interactions: (Un)Collaboration, (Im)Politeness, Power
• Part Three Beyond the “Text”: Multimodality, Paratextuality, Transmediality
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright