SEMANTICS OF CHARACTER' NAMES IN ENGLISH, RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN AUTHORED FAIRY TALE

Abstract

The article highlights the characters' names which are the special system of proper names. The classification of characters' names in English, Russian and Ukrainian fairy tales according to their semantics is presented in the article. There is a comparative analysis of semantic units of characters' names in the languages under consideration. The common and distinctive features of semantics functioning in characters' names of fairy tales are given in the article.

The proper names of literary work make up a special system of names which accumulates and stores important historical and cultural information about people's life. Proper names cannot be taken under consideration without the specific cultural and historical context, even if characters’ names of fairy-tales discourse based on folk tradition of naming. The topicality lies in insufficient study of fairy-tale characters' names in comparative aspect in terms of semantics based on English, Russian and Ukrainian fairy-tales. The aim of the study is to provide semantic analysis of characters' names of fairy-tale discourse in English, Russian, Ukrainian languages. The object of the study is characters’ names in fairy-tales of 19th – 21th centuries in three languages. The subject of the research is semantic peculiarities of characters’ names in English, Russian and Ukrainian fairy-tales. The material of the study was obtained by overall analysis in English, Russian and Ukrainian fairy-tales (150 fairy-tales) and 1246 units (proper names).

Most of the names of fairy-tale characters are based not on one but on several semantic units. A small part of fairy-tale characters has only one semantic unit, mostly the names of the people presented in fairy tales. Characters` names that have the semantic unit of appearance tend to get a sign of either negative or positive attitude of the author to the character. In Ukrainian and Russian fairy-tales the names the semantic unit of gender prevails. The names of English fairy-tales, unlike the Ukrainian and Russian, do not have such semantic units as ‘plants’ and ‘natural phenomenon’ There is only one name with the semantics of ‘destiny of a character’.

Semantic unit ‘appearance’ prevails in English texts: Eng. – 18%, Ukr. – 9.4% , Russ. – 5,6 %. These figures can be explained by a set of fairy-tales characters in English texts, in most cases, these are animals, and authors often resort to adding a description of the animal, to distinguish it from the others.

In Ukrainian fairy-tales, in comparison with English and Russian ones, there is a clear domination of characters` names with the evaluative semantics (positive or negative). Age of characters is the category often seen in Russian fairy-tales also names tend to get the semantics of ‘relationship’ category.