SPECIFICITY OF FUNCTIONING OF THE ADJECTIVES DERIVED FROM CHARACTONYMS OF AMERICAN AND BRITISH ORIGIN

Abstract

The subject of the study is the specificity of implementing adjectives derived from literary proper nouns in a range of texts pertaining to different functional styles (belles-lettres and publicist styles). The topicality of the undertaken research is determined by the insufficient number of studies dealing with metaphorization, transonimization, derivative potential, collocability of literary anthroponyms. Another interesting focus of attention is a constantly changing repertoire of literary proper names and the dynamics of their actual usage in the English language. The major aim of the undertaken research is to reveal the distinctive features of the contemporary usage of the adjectives derived from American and British literary proper nouns. In the course of the research the following scientific methods are used: method of continuous sampling, comparative and contrastive methods, statistical method, descriptive method. The contemporary usage of forty-three derived adjectives is scrutinized: the most frequent affixes are determined (18 adjectives are formed with the help of -ian; 10 adjectives are affixed with -ish; 7 adjectives are built with -esque); the major functions of the derived adjectives are summed up as: linguistic compression of information, aesthetic-stylistic function, evaluative function, opinion-shaping function); the starting points and the maximum peaks in the usage of derived adjectives are highlighted.