Stouni, Doorsovia, Velveti. Masculine virile nominal forms for names of music bands and their meanings on metonymic continuum

Abstract

Abstract The study deals with the special usage of masculine virile forms to name music bands in Slovak. The names of music bands are usually classified as a special subtype of chrematonyms which name the artistic groups and are labelled as ergonyms in the theoretical works. Masculine virile forms can be used with a heterogenous range of meanings depending on context which can be understood as result of metonymic transpositions. The study focuses on description of units warranted by proper names which arise in two deproprial processes – transonymization and appellativization. The analysed material comes from web corpus Omnia Slovaca IV Maior. Metonymy is understood as a gradient phenomenon with instantiations that form a continuum on a scale depending on the strength of contiguity. Metonymy gives rise to a variety of readings, which are often difficult to capture and whose meaning has to be specified in the course of interpretation by contextual cues and pragmatic inferences. This fact leads to orthographic instability concerning the usage of capital letters.