Onyms in English, Russian, and Ukrainian Literary Fairytales.

Abstract

The thesis is devoted to the comparative analysis of proper names in the authorial literary fairytale on the empiric material collected from closely and distantly related languages (English, Russian, and Ukrainian).

The research of the characters’ nomination as a secondary text has been developed in the paper – it is found that the texts under analysis adopt and reinterpret the folklore element. It is established that traditional forms of the character nomination, borrowed from the folk fairytale, interact with fictitious onyms and form a unique onymic continuum of the authorial fairytale, therefore the analysed units must be interpreted viewing the text of the fairy tale as a whole and considering the broad cultural context.

The dominating components of the English, Russian, and Ukrainian literary fairytale onymic continuum are identified and analysed in this research, i.e. anthropoetonyms, zoopoetonyms, topopoetonyms, fictonyms.

The common and distinctive features of the nucleus and periphery structure (mythopoetonyms, nautonyms, ecclesionyms, pragmatonyms, etc.) in English, Russian, and Ukrainian are established in the paper.

The paper traces specific features of the authorial onymic continuum in the magic fairytale: traditional names of people; onyms, borrowed from the folk fairytale; the names of animal characters, etc.; the domestic fairytale: anthropoetonyms, originating from historical and cultural names; topoethonyms, originating from name of the real geographic locations; the animalistic fairytales: the enlarged onymic paradigm; the combination of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic semantic components in the nomination of animals, etc.

The paper studies the methods and means which help create the continuum of the fairytale text and transmit the artistic message, thus reflecting the author’s individual style (multicomponent name descriptors, onymic-appellative complexes, merging of personal names with high reputation with pejorated toponyms, etc.).

Productive language means and methods of building the proprial units allowed to prove the motivated nature of the literary fairytale poetonyms in the languages under study. It is established that the derivational stems for the poetonyms word-building can be appellatives (lexemes-motivators); folkloronyms; names borrowed from the historical and cultural context (intertext). Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the following derivational patterns: 1) onym → poetonym; 2) folkloronym → poetonym; 3) poetonym1 → poetonym2.

In the paper, the productive ways of word-building and play on words in the literary fairytale are distinguished, i.e. 1) the pattern of dividing the word changing form; 2) the (non-)correlation of the proper name grammatical gender with the appellative gender; 3) the involvement of the number category for the formation of the poetonyms’ figurative meaning; 4) absolute onymisation; 5) grammatical onymisation; 6) suffixation; 7) combination of wordforms; 8) the combination of various parts of speech word forms; 9) sound-associative poetonyms (rhyme, alliteration, repetition of components), etc.

The identification of obligatory and optional semantic components of poetonyms in closely and distantly related languages allowed to prove the polysemantic character of the proper names notional structure – the universal of the literary fairy tale. It is also established that the productive seme in the poetonym are the components: ‘man’ / ‘animal, bird’ / ‘insect’ / ‘plant’ / ‘nature phenomenon’. The optional semes are ‘character / behaviour’, ‘appearance’, ‘function’, ‘profession / occupation’, ‘social position / kinship’, ‘quality’, ‘habitat’, ‘fate’, etc.

The analysis of the fairytale onymic component (the characters’ nomination) also allowed to single out the following types of characters: 1) the hero; 2) the anti-hero; 3) the assistant; 4) the object of search / reward; 5) other characters. All the above categories have common and distinctive features found in English, Russian, and Ukrainian literary fairytales.

The study of the topoetonyms’ functions, distinctive features of expressing external and transitional titles, the contrastive analysis of the onymic continuum, etc. helped identify and describe the literary fairytale discourse common and distinctive features in the texts of closely and distantly related languages.

The perspective of the research lies in the further study of the folklore and literary fairytale nucleus and the periphery of the onymic continuum, which will help single out features common to the semantics and poetics of the name, its functional meaning, textforming potential, etc.