Morphology Commons^™

Lexical Selection And New Word Formation In Apex Legends, Genevieve Dickerson

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This research observes the use of language within FPS gaming. Data was collected by solo queuing into the battle royale FPS, Apex Legends, and analyzing the way the player group develops different verbiage to meet the communication needs of the game. Four forms of word-formation mechanisms were observed: compounding (hitbox), borrowing (heaven), noun-verb conversion (spawn), and new-word formation (int-ing). This work supports the hypothesis that the lexical formations which are most-opted for within these games result from noun-verb conversion, due to the fact that these formations are typically monosyllabic and thus more efficient within time-sensitive gameplay. This research explores …