The Spiral Development Conception of a Proper Name Meaning

Abstract

This article is devoted to the consideration of creating a new conception of a proper name meaning spiral development. The existing views on the problem of onymic meaning, its structure and factors influencing the formation of the latter are briefly presented. The idea of using the spiral model to explain the formation of the extralinguistic aspect of the meaning of a proper name, its extension and implementation options in discourse is presented. The evolution of the extralinguistic component of meaning goes in a spiral and has no ending point. The more the name functions in discourse, the wider (more elastic) its extralinguistic meaning becomes, which will change under the influence of the socio-cultural context, transformations in the social environment, events taking place in the world, actions performed by individuals and their perception by society (in a specific time period). The meaning of the name develops in a spiral, the coils of which represent the functional levels. The issues of the transition of onyms to the status of precedent names, as well as the dynamics of precedence, its actualization and deactualization are considered. Specific examples show the presence of several meanings in the structure of a proper name and illustrate the phenomena of onomastic synonymy and antonymy. The questions of expanding the interpretative potential of proper names and its dependence on the extralinguistic aspect of the onymic meaning are touched upon.

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