The linguistic complexity of texts of the "virtual museum tour" genre (based on the material of a virtual visit to the State Hermitage Museum)

The article discusses the linguistic features of the texts of the virtual visit to the State Hermitage Museum, available on its official website. The aim of the study is to analyze the set of lexical, morphological, syntactic and discursive metrics of the linguistic complexity of these texts in comparison with the same metrics of scientific art history texts and mass media texts about art to answer the question of whether the level of complexity of the text content of a virtual excursion corresponds to the expectations that the frame of the speech genre "virtual excursion" forms - to be informative and, at the same time, attractive and uncomplicated. The research material consisted of 3 corpora: a corpus of virtual visit texts with a total volume of 169,223 tokens; a corpus of scientific articles on art history -187,695 tokens, a corpus of mass media texts about art - 186,123 tokens. The research methodology included (1) description of the speech genre "virtual museum tour", its genre features, (2) calculation of the values of 132 metrics of linguistic complexity of texts from three subcorpora using a computer model, (3) identifying the specific features of "Hermitage" texts in comparison with the two other text subcorpora, (4) analysis of the correlation of specific features with the characteristics of the speech genre of virtual excursion. The analysis of text linguistic complexity metrics showed that the texts of the virtual visit to the Hermitage differ from both text corpora in comparison at the level of their basic metrics that are not closely related to one or another level of the language system: sentence length, indexes of lexical diversity, the presence of numeric symbols, high nominativity index, and low verbality index, which results in a number of grammatical text properties. The "Hermitage" texts approach mass media texts mainly at the level of morphology and syntax, and with scientific texts they only have in common a rather high value of the proportion of long words. Comparing the specifics identified at the level of linguistic complexity metrics with the characteristics of the "virtual excursion" speech genre, we determined that there is a correspondence between the metrics and such characteristics of the genre as descriptiveness, informativeness, linguistic simplicity, and non-banality of the communicative style. At the same time, it was found that the texts practically do not contain verbal means contributing to the realization of such genre feature as "argumentativeness": the proportion of speech markers of persistence, deictic means of ensuring coherence of discourse, etc. is generally very low. The prospect of research is an experimental study of the difficulty of such texts for the reader's perception. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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