Family Name Socio-Pragmatic Informative Value
in the LiteraryWorks by H. Böll
The article is aimed at revealing the specificity of socio-pragmatic informative value of literary anthroponyms used by H. Böll in his literary works. The study of the onyms mentioned in such an aspect demonstrates the lack of comprehensive research. As a result, the findings covered this aspect are dispersal in scientific and practical work. However, literary onyms are considered to be semantic and text-forming units of a literary text and they are used to identify and differentiate the persons on their social, cultural, and psychological background, as well as to create the characters with national peculiarities. The object of the study includes the contextual units representing the «family names» anthroponymic category. The data collected are based on the following literary works by H. Böll: «Where Were You, Adam?» («Wo warst du, Adam?»), «Billiards at Half-Past Nine» («Billard um halb zehn»), «House without Guardians» («Haus ohne Hüter»), «The Clown» («Ansichten eines Clowns»). The continuous sampling method, qualitative-quantitative and descriptive ones, component and contextual analysis have been used as study methodology. The article contains certain essential results of the dissertation that have not been published yet. It is established that family names used by H. Böll are a means of revealing the following socio-pragmatic information: 1) the character’s nationality (a correlation between literary family names and the real national anthroponymic system is revealed); 2) a geographical location (family names with a typical sound and alphabetic composition that helps to define the place where the events occur); 3) social status (family names with the «von» component indicate both the character’s social status and their relationship with other members of the community); 4) a direct / indirect character’s description (family names with pure inner forms of the words and an updated internal form and appellatively based family names).