The Structural and functional features of anthroponyms, zoonyms and toponyms in a contrastive dimension (based on the original English and German translation of the fantasy novel by George Martin «A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones»).

Abstract

The Master’s research paper is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of onym usage in George Martin’s novel «A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones», their influence on the general picture of the plot construction as a piece of art; the analysis of the lexical-semantic and structural features of the names of these types is carried out.
The emperic material of the research includes English and German proper names, selected by continuous sampling from the book and its translation, in particular: anthropoetonyms, zoopoetonyms and topopoetonyms from George Martin’s fantasy novel «A Game of Thrones». The sampling comprises 805 lexical units.
Methodological basis of the work is the structural-system approach. The peculiarity of the researched subject provides the usage of a descriptive-comparative method, which consists in comparing linguistic units to establish their differential characteristics, and is used to combine their functional characteristics into definite groups and component analysis to distribute lexical units into semantic components.
Semantically, the biggest percentage was formed by the group of anthropoetonyms, which constitutes 62% (470 units). Topopoetonyms make up 35% (323 units). Zoopoetonyms in «A Game of Thrones» have the lowest percentage, equal only to 3% (12 units). The author uses anthropoetonyms, to provide the reader with additional information about the peculiarities of the character, origin, nationality and other features of the characters. Many anthropoetonyms are descriptive or associative.