Anthroponymic Personification in Professional Speech and Jargon

Abstract

The paper studies anthroponymic personification used for naming artefacts in professional and slang speech. The study is based on anthroponymic names recorded in the professional speech of workers (miners, railway and construction workers of the Perm Krai), in the jargon of social communities (youth, criminal, military, and other). The studied units were retrieved from jargon dictionaries, interviews and conversations with workers of Perm mining enterprises, the author’s own observations of the speech of jargon speakers in Perm and miners of the Kizelovsky coal basin. Anthroponymic personifications are considered as facts of subcultures, expressing their value attitudes, as well as a cognitive tool. Personification is regarded as a psychological phenomenon, a verbalization of ideas relating to the inner world of a person. In parallel, this is also a linguistic (semantic) process used for capturing new knowledge in the language, expressing evaluation of a particular object. The purpose of the study is to identify the causes and the means of personification in professional speech and jargons, and to analyze the functions of these names. It was found that the contextual animation of non-living things is a productive way of naming complex professional and highly specialized phenomena, particularly emotionally loaded. Giving human properties to objects of the production and technical sphere stresses their significance in the professional and social community and is used as a way of building professional knowledge. In addition, personification works as a form of a language game based on rethinking the cultural connotations of the word and manipulations with its material form.