About existing and not existing referents of proper names – anthropocentrism in onomastics

In the article the author widely covers the problem of names’ reference, especially proper names. The phenomenon of reference is discussed on the basis of Ogden/Richards triangle, showing the tri-elemental relation between the symbol, the concept and the referent. The author is pointing out the practice of inaccurate use of terms in the scientific discourse of research into reference and he sorts it out in the terminology by showing the difference between, among others, the reference, the designation and the denotation. The author’s considerations are full of examples which illustrate the essence of these terms and their relations. From the conclusion about the symbol and the concept he moves to the description of reality whose elements are the nominated objects. The extra-linguistic reality in which objects – capable of becoming the referents of various expressions – occur is described in accord with Kantian anthropocentric philosophical thought.

Anthroponyms in S. Skliarenko’s historical novel «Volodymyr»

The paper provides a lexical and semantic analysis of the anthroponyms in Semen Skliarenko’s historical novel «Volodymyr», that illustrates the difficult time of Kievan Rus’ and Volodymyr’s personal life as well as the people surrounding him. Therefore, there is a strong trend showing a great many of the historic personalities’ names sustaining a chronotope of the novel. The proper names mentioned in the novel grant invaluable information how to interpret the whole text, sometimes impossible to express with other means. Among the anthroponyms we can see that the names of the Kyiv princes and princesses (Sviatoslav, Yaropolk, Oleg, Boleslav, Kyi, Shchek, Yaroslav, Volodymyr, Olga) are the most usable and most important in the aspect of the sense. The names of the famous emperors and kings (Shishman, Olaf, John, Constantine, Boleslav, Basil) are no mere less important. The author, S. Skliarenko involves plenty of proper names of foreign origin (Rurik, Rogvolod, Tur, Rogneda) to depict the historical reality. The names of the invented characters as well as the ones of the real historic personalities are not in sharp contrast either in stylistic or in functional terms, they do not differ in the terms of grammar structures although they belong to various cultures, historic periods and ethnic traditions. Each literary and artistic onym mentioned in the novel plays its own functional role. Semen Skliarenko uses the words of the literature and artistic onomastics to make them as a powerful expressive factor. Nominative literary and artistic anthroponyms serve as a ground for artistic onomastics to come along without any accompanying connotations. They are used in the novel only to call denotations unambiguously and differentiate them from the other characters. The characteristic function demonstrates national or regional affiliations, and it can also express certain features of the characters, their appearance, it expresses designated emotional attitude to the named character, the function can participate in the creation of temporal and spatial background of the novel. The chronological function becomes second to none when it specifies both a certain time and a certain place or just only one of these two indicators. In the analyzed novel, we have found some proper names bearing the ideological function with a negative connotation. The expressive and evaluative functions come as a set of means showing the characters’ emotional and expressive evaluation ranging from the pet form to the rude one. The text production function of proper names summarizes the features of the above functions, and we can see it in the novel due to the vast application of anthroponyms as connecting structural elements of the text. Thus, the anthroponyms in the analyzed novel creates ample opportunities for the study of individual names invented by the author, it will contribute to a deeper studying of the theory of precedent names, a more complete description of the idiosyncrasy of the write. As a prospective we are going to continue further research of Semen Skliarenko’s onomasticon as pragmatics aspect.