| Abstract [eng] |
Nicknames are understood as an informal personal name that individualises an athlete, often occurring if a person has a feature of appearance that is unusual in the community, a distinctive personality trait, an unusual activity, or a lengthy first name, last name, or in order to speed up the communication. The object of this paper is the onomastic motivation, semantics and usage of athletes' nicknames, and the aim is to investigate the onomastic motivation, semantics and usage of athletes' nicknames. To achieve the goal, 1145 nicknames were collected and the following tasks were set: to review the onomastic theory of nicknames research, insights of onomastics; to present the methodology and instruments of the research material; to classify and describe the motives for the emergence of athletes' nicknames; to analyse the semantics of athletes' nicknames; to discuss the usage of athletes' nicknames and the factors that determined it. The descriptive, comparative, interpretative and mathematical calculation methods were used. The quantitative research method used to collect the research data was a questionnaire survey. The results of the study revealed that the most frequent motives for nicknames in the sports community are phonetic and onomastic associations, abbreviations and other derivatives of names, the most frequent motives are exceptional physical and personality traits, (anti-)merits, activities, the less frequent motives are descent, nationality and religion, sport, and the least frequent motives are tribal nicknames, age, wealth, and distinction. An analysis of the semantics of athletes' nicknames shows that the most frequent nicknames are based on the appellative, while the number of nicknames based on the test word is low. The following groups of appellative-based nicknames were identified: living objects (plants and mushrooms, animals, names of persons), inanimate objects (edible and inedible) and not things (elements of language, weather elements, incidents and events, numerals). The following groups of pronouns should be mentioned: place names, names of people, characters, celebrities and deities. A review of the survey data shows that respondents have a broader understanding of the concept of nicknames than onomastics researchers, as nicknames include abbreviations of names, acronyms, and occasionally even pseudonyms. Fans are increasingly choosing to use nicknames rather than referring to athletes by their official names, and nicknames are a convenient tool for communication in the sports community. The analysis revealed that positive nicknames are more common in the sports community than negative nicknames, which changes the purposes of nicknames. |
