Unconventional Anthroponyms

Unconventional Anthroponyms: Formation Patterns and Discursive Function continues a series of collective volumes comprising studies on onomastics, edited by Oliviu Felecan with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Previous titles in this series include Name and Naming: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives (2012) and Onomastics in Contemporary Public Space (2013, co-edited with Alina BugheAYiu).In contemporary naming practice, one can distinguish two verbal (linguistic) means of nominal referential identification: a ",natural", one, which occurs in the process of conventional, official, canonical, standard naming and results in conventional/official/canonical/standard anthroponyms, a ",motivated", one, which occurs in the process of unconventional, unofficial, uncanonical, non-standard naming and results in unconventional/unofficial/uncanonical/non-standard anthroponyms.The significance of an official name is arbitrary, conventional, unmotivated, occasional and circumstantial, as names are not likely to carry any intrinsic meaning, names are given by third parties (parents, godparents, other relatives and so on) with the intention to individualise (to differentiate from other individuals). Any meaning with which a name might be endowed should be credited to the name giver: s/he assigns several potential interpretations to the phonetic form of choice, based on his/her aesthetic and cultural options and other kinds of tastes, which are manifested at a certain time.Unconventional anthroponyms (nicknames, bynames, user names, pseudonyms, hypocoristics, individual and group appellatives that undergo anthroponymisation) are nominal ",derivatives", that result from a name giver's wish to attach a specifying/defining verbal (linguistic) tag to a certain individual. An unconventional anthroponym is a person's singular signum, which may convey a practical necessity (to avoid anthroponymic homonymy: the existence of several bearers for a particular name) or the intention to qualify a certain human type (to underline specific difference - in this case, the unconventional anthroponym has an over-individualising role - or, on the contrary, to mark an individual's belonging to a class, his/her association with other individuals with whom s/he is typologically related - see the case of generic unconventional anthroponyms).