Heuristic and functional aspects of nomination (case-study of English anthroponymic sobriquet formations)

The article deals with functional and heuristic features of anthroponymic sobriquets in such English discourse varieties as literary discursive space, political discourse, Public Relations-discourse. Anthroponymic sobriquets represent themselves as the units of secondary nomination and linguistic manifestations of evaluative process, in which certain attitudes of linguocultural surroundings are formed and expressed. While being represented in discourse the units under analysis fulfill such basic functions as identification and evaluation, based on individual subjective characteristics that in the course of time acquire the more general character and to a certain extent tend to become possession of the linguistic cultural community. Being part of the discursive space anthroponymic sobriquets may acquire peculiar characteristics determined by communicative-pragmatic features of corresponding texts and communicative situations in question. In terms of their functional and heuristic perspectives anthroponymic nicknames serve to be the result of optimization with respect to linguistic means and intellectual effort saving, which refers to the semantic and structural peculiarities of the units under analysis, which can be regarded as both linguistic signs and signs-indexes performing discursive functions.