This study explores the meaning of five game related words and whether there is semantic variation within the lexicon of the gaming community. Even though there are tens of thousands of video games...Show moreThis study explores the meaning of five game related words and whether there is semantic variation within the lexicon of the gaming community. Even though there are tens of thousands of video games on the market (Statista, 2022a) and around three billion gamers worldwide (Newzoo, 2021), little research has been done concerning gamers’ linguistics. This research includes an analysis based on a worldwide online survey about the meaning of five gaming terms. 379 respondents gave answers about their age, gender, country of origin and their most played games, as well as their description of five given gaming terms. The respondents were sorted into four categories, or Gamer Types, based on the game genre they play the most. The correlation between the Gamer Types and their descriptions of the five gaming words was analysed. The results of this research suggest that there is semantic variation within the gaming community. However, the results also imply there is no immediate correlation between the Gamer Types and their descriptions of the given gaming terms.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis concerns the semantic relations between coordination, conditionality and interrogativity. Some aspects of these relations have been noted in work concerning grammaticalization, typology...Show moreThis thesis concerns the semantic relations between coordination, conditionality and interrogativity. Some aspects of these relations have been noted in work concerning grammaticalization, typology and formal semantics. A notable example is the Russian question marker li, which is also found in the form for the disjunctive marker ili 'or' and the form for the conditional marker esli 'if'. While aspects of these relations have been examined in the past, this thesis fills out the gap in the study of the relations between coordination, conditionals and questions by putting them together in a semantic map. To examine the possible universality of these relations, the use of these concepts is investigated in three unrelated languages: Dutch, Macedonian and Wolof. The relations are indicated per language in separate semantic maps and finally plotted together in a single one to examine the overlap and differences between them. The most similarities are expected between Macedonian and Dutch, as they are both from the same family, namely Indo-European, while Wolof is an Atlantic language from the Niger-Congo family. This turns out to indeed be the case. Some of the relations are language specific, but there are universal cross-linguistic patterns, such as the relation between propositional questions and disjunction, which is found in all three of these languages. Thus, this contributes to the insight of the cross-linguistic universality of these concepts.Show less
