Bahman Zandi; Fatemeh Yousefi Rad; Seyed Mahmoud Motesharrei
Abstract
Onomastics is a branch of linguistics, or according to Crystal (2008), a branch of semantics; onomastics has been studied from different perspectives. This paper addressed onomastics from the perspective of the social-cognitive (sociocognitive) linguistic approach, which is the corollary of cognitive ...
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Onomastics is a branch of linguistics, or according to Crystal (2008), a branch of semantics; onomastics has been studied from different perspectives. This paper addressed onomastics from the perspective of the social-cognitive (sociocognitive) linguistic approach, which is the corollary of cognitive linguistics and social linguistics. Social-cognitive onomastics, which can be subsumed under social-cognitive linguistics, covers the core concepts of a usage-based understanding of language, intralanguage and inter-language diversities, categorization and prototypes, cultural patterns, social senses, and the counter-effect of language, culture, and ideology. It merits mention that most studies in the area of cognitive linguistics and the newer, less studied social-cognitive linguistics focus on concepts and semantics. Scholars believe it is necessary and inevitable to shift from concepts to (proper) names, i.e. onomastics, in cognitive and social linguistics. The aim of this paper, applying documentary research method, is in line with and a continuation of a research plan launched by Zandi and Ahmadi in 2016; the only difference is that the current paper paid special attention to common nouns that represent a category. This paper also gave another outlook: an emphasis on a usage-based approach in onomastics. Pragmatically speaking, onomastics touches upon actual lexical selections from among expressions and examines the factors affecting the selection of a particular expression. The results showed that numerous factors affect the selection of a proper word for a signified concept, with context having the greatest effect.
