THE SPECIFIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH VIRTUAL MYTHOTOPONYMS

Abstract

Introduction. The proposed study examines modern computer games from a linguistic, namely onomastic, point of view, in particular, various features of onymic vocabulary such as their motivation features are studied through the prism of psychomental operations that occur while their formation, and their role in electronic discourse of computer games is analyzed, therefore, the research belongs to the cognitive-discursive paradigm.Purpose. The purpose of the study is to establish the general patterns of English-language nomination of objects in the virtual worlds of computer games. The object of the research is the English-language onymic space of modern computer games. The subject of the research is the structural and semantic features of virtual mythotoponyms in the electronic discourse of computer games.Material and methods. The material of the research was 300 virtual mythonyms, selected by the means of continuous sampling technique from popular English-language games of various genres. While researching the generally used methods in modern onomastic investigations were applied: general scientific, such as induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis for creating the type of the research that would correspond the standards of the world science; general linguistic, such as descriptive, taxonomic and structural, for classifying and organizing the material; as well as special onomastic, namely motivational analysis for reconstructing of the onym nomination motives. A quantitative method was also used for summarizing and quantifying the results of the study.Results. The newest direction in onomastics such as virtual mythonymy was characterized and virtual mythotoponyms in the electronic discourse of computer games were singled out, as well as the functional and motivational features of virtual mythotoponyms were outlined.Conclusions. It was determined that the main functions of virtual mythotoponyms include: the dividing of the player’s in-game experience into segments to facilitate the orientation in space and time of the game, as well as to facilitate the communication between the players, symbolic and stereotyping functions to maintain the atmosphere of the game. Regarding the motivational features of virtual mythotoponyms, the following types of motivation dominate: the mixed one (38%), in particular, adding a propositional component to the onym with an unknown or associative motivation, and the propositional one (31%), that serves to create self-explanatory names and the associative one (25%), that is the expression of the creative freedom of the developers and sometimes serves to perform a symbolic function.