Planuj, ulepszaj, zdobywaj, walcz… Co mówią nam czasowniki w trybie rozkazującym w opisach gier akcji i strategicznych? Kontrastywna analiza korpusowa – perspektywa ilościowa

Abstract

The subject matter of this article concerns the imperative verb forms appearing in promotional descriptions of action and strategy games from e-commerce websites. The aim of the research was (1) to determine the semantic categories of imperatives present in such texts (treated as a paratext fulfilling a persuasive function) and (2) to establish if those categories appear in the descriptions of games of different genres in similar or differing proportions. The author created two corpora consisting of a total of 200 texts (100 descriptions of action games and 100 descriptions of strategy games), using the Korpusomat software and extracted lexical data automatically. The forms were assigned to particular meanings based on definitions available at the lexical database Słowosieć (plWordNet), then the lexical units were attributed to semantic domains (such as combat and conflict), and proportions were calculated on the basis of these findings with regards to the represented categories of meanings. The comparative analysis of the said outcomes brought about the conclusion that the imperative verb forms present in the descriptions of action and strategy games belong to almost all domains (excluding the category of atmospheric phenomena), and their quantity is of similar proportions. Based on the quantitative indicators, only one significant difference can be noticed – in the descriptions of action games there was a clearly higher percentage of verbs from the movement domain, while the strategy game corpus indicated higher appearances of verbs from the creation domain.