THE ONOMASTIC PECULIARITIES OF QUEST NAMES IN ELECTRONIC GAMES

Abstract

The personal names that nominate objects of virtual worlds of electronic games in the English language are the object of the study. The functional, motivational, derivational, and structural features of one of the classes of electronic game names, quest names, is the subject of the study. The material of the study is comprised of 200 quest names from the game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The following statements can be considered the outcomes of our research: 1) themain functions of quest names are to systematize and break down the gaming experience into phases, and also to facilitate the orientation in the game world; 2) these functions determine their structural and derivational peculiarities — the most common are composite quest names, formed by compounding, which allow describing the essence of the quest more extensively; 3) as for the motivation of quest names, propositional motivation is the most common; its goal is to facilitate the player’s orientation in the virtual universe.