Abstract
This article explores the linguistic-cultural aspects and usage of phraseological units involving personal and place names in English. The introductory sections outline the linguistic features of proper names and phraseological units. The qualitative part of this study provides a list of units belonging to four phraseological types (idioms, stereotyped similes, binomials, formulae), drawn from idiom dictionaries. An investigation of the sources of names shows that the personal and place names involved are historically, socially or culturally prominent in British culture. Here is noted a predominance of personal over place names, and within the former, a predominance of male over female names, and first names over family names, with a number of hypocorisms. The quantitative part of the study consists of a corpus search of the selected units in the British National Corpus in order to find their frequency and distribution across registers. The search reveals that they have very low levels of occurrence, and are more commonly used in written registers, in particular, in fiction, journalism and miscellaneous texts.
Highlights
Naming a single entity is one of the basic speech acts, included by Searle (1975) in the class of declaratives, alongside declaring war, dismissing and bequeathing
The dominant subtype of phraseological units, we observe that they involve elements regarded as relevant for various reasons: body parts, because human beings as natural entities are at the centre of language; natural elements, animals, colours, clothing and food, because they are salient aspects of everyday life; references to the Bible, because it is culturally relevant in Anglo-Saxon society
Let us consider the semantics of PNs, an issue much discussed from Mill (1867) onwards. They are diachronically motivated, and a meaningful etymon is found in most cases: e.g. family names derive from elements of common vocabulary referring to parentage, or occupation
Summary
Naming a single entity is one of the basic speech acts, included by Searle (1975) in the class of declaratives, alongside declaring war, dismissing and bequeathing. The dominant subtype of phraseological units, we observe that they involve elements regarded as relevant for various reasons: body parts, because human beings as natural (and cultural) entities are at the centre of language; natural elements, animals, colours, clothing and food, because they are salient aspects of everyday life; references to the Bible, because it is culturally relevant in Anglo-Saxon society. We expect to find a number of PNs because of their great importance in human communication, where they are signs of cultural, linguistic, geographical, ethnic and social identity. Their analysis can offer an insight into the interplay between language and culture in phraseology. This paper aiming to explore the linguistic-cultural aspects and usage of phraseological units containing personal and place names (the major PN subcategories), is organised as follows.
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