Status game: a text-building tool involving proper names (based on Tatyana Tolstaya’s short story All sorts of Nonsense)

Abstract

The article offers a linguistic analysis of a text-building tool, which consists in replacing Russian words with the names of German cities, which have a varying degree of phonetic similarity with these words and don’t have any grammatical markers. In this way, a comic effect arises, based on bisociation — the interaction of two mental and linguistic spaces which have nothing in common.  The German toponyms which are positioned by the author of the story as “speaking names”, but are actually quasi-words, perform a function in the text that is very far from the functions of speaking names: such quasi-words de-automatize the perception of the text.  In the paper, quasi-words are classified according to their similarity to the potential Russian word-form they replace. The analysis highlights the role of textual hints which include syntactic position and grammatical markers of gender, allowing the addressee to decode the Russian word-form encoded in the form of a foreign toponym. The issue “proper name in lieu of a common noun” in text has not yet been unambiguously solved in onomastics. Therefore, we propose to use the term onym accidentia to denote the drifting referential status of a proper name in the text space. Onym accidentia refers to the special phantom status of a proper name in the text, which cannot be described in the traditional onomastic terms of deonymization, appellativization, or antonomasia. It is the onym accidentia in the text that provides great opportunities for linguistic games and serves as a kind of “poetization” of the discourse.