MIDDLE ENGLISH FAMILY NAMES AS A SOURCE OF STUDY OF MIDDLE ENGLISH VOCABULARY: LINGUISTIC AND SOCIAL-HISTORICAL ASPECTS
Journal Title: Scientific journal «International Journal of Philology» - Year 2016, Vol 1, Issue 248
Abstract
The article focuses on the problem of the study of common nouns and personal names, especially Middle English surnames, within one of their historical layers, which gives us the possibility to disclose lingual means and ways of identification of people, interrelation of funds of proper names of neighboring territories in the process of formation of national language. The linguistic analysis of common and proper nouns is still an inexhaustible source of the study of historical and cultural heritage of people, first of all of its social and political structure, especially its production, everyday life, religion, customs, traditions and so on. It helps in its turn to trace the salient traits of individuality of the peoples against the background of its neighbors in space and time. The social category of the family names is indicated by the following salient traits: 1) they are functioning in the human society; they came into existence as the constant, hereditary names, which identify the human body and meet the requirements of the society and its members; 2) the development and functioning of the family names depends from the social, economic and cultural level of the society; family names first come into existence in the economically and culturally developed, as a rule, centralized societies; 3) in the societies with class differentiation in different social layers the family names appear very irregularly. Family name may be treated as the historic category according to the following peculiar features: 1) all the categories of personal names are influenced by the history of nation. As the official hereditary name family name come into existence in the very definite historical period on the definite stage of its development; 2) the process of the family names formation lasted for centuries in several stages. Until the formation of family names haven’t finished in the language there co-existed the nominations of different types: the most productive in the language of that period of time, obsolete ones, those which only come into appearance, and many transitional forms; 3) family names serve as the ‘reservation for language rarities’ – they shelter the words and word-building models, which disappeared or became non-productive in the process of the historical development. The purpose of the article is to investigate the Middle English surname as a complex sociolinguistic and historical category of personal names of the period of active formation of the English system of surnames. The problem of nominative, identification and social functions of the medieval surname is very urgent in the aspect of study of Middle English vocabulary. The investigation was held on the basis of the theoretical-linguistic analysis of the scientific papers on the History of the English language and the History of England and other European countries. The article gives light on the results of the study of Middle English surnames in Modern linguistics, especially of their linguistic and social aspects, their nature and functioning as an essential element of human interrelation. There are two aspects of these study – linguistic, which focuses on the inner structure of the surnames, and social- linguistic, which focuses on the social-linguistic phenomena of the personal names. The originality of the article under review lies in the fact that it was in several ways fully scientifically proved that the medieval system of surnames must be regarded as the linguistic material of investigation of Middle English vocabulary. In conclusion the author strengthens the point of view that the social-linguistic and linguistic value of the Medieval surnames as well as three aspects of the surnames – linguistic, social and historical – made it necessary to include the Mediaeval surnames, especially the names of occupation and office, into the essential list of material for further linguistic investigation the Middle English vocabulary, which will obligatorily give the valuable quantitative and qualitative increase in the results of such a study.
Authors and Affiliations
O Dobrovolska
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP386866
- DOI -
- Views 120
- Downloads 0
FORMATION OF COMMUNICATIVE ABILITIES AND SKILLS AT THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE: EXPERIENCE OF FOREIGN EXPERTS
This article is devoted to the study of international experience on the formation and development of communicative abilities and skills in teaching students German language outside Germany. Based on the analysis of scie...
MULTIFUNCTIONALITY AS A PRAGMATIC CHARACTERISTIC OF EPIDEICTIC DISCOURSE
The article is devoted to the issue of multifunctionality of epideictic discourse as one of its key pragmatic functions. We have identified the main functions of epideictic speeches: argumentative function; declarative f...
DISCOURSE EXPRESSIONS WITH AN ACTUALIZED PREPOSITIVE COMPONENT
For a long time a sentence has been considered the most important unit of a language and speech. However, this approach did not provide any theoretical study of the process of speech communication, nor the implementation...
LEXICAL-SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES OF GERMAN TERMS OF CROP PRODUCTION AND ITS TRANSLATION
The article describes the terminology of crop production in modern German language. It was found that the crop as one of the leading branches of the agricultural sector has an extensive terminological system. Typical Ger...
LINGUOCULTURAL FEATURES OF MODERN ENGLISH SPORTS DISCOURSE
The study of linguocultural peculiarities of English sports reporting allows to understand the mentality of the nation, its values and stereotypes. The analysis of English sports coverage in the printed media proves that...