Resumen de A Psycholinguistic Approach to Nicknaming (With Reference to Nicknames Given by Students to Teachers)
The present paper aims to study the psychological processes (and, implicitly, the linguistic products) by means of which students nickname teachers and to analyse the discursive functions that the corresponding onomastic variants develop in actual communication situations. A multi-disciplinary approach is proposed, as the intention is to deal with language facts from an onomastic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspective. While describing the link between the structure of nicknames and mental processes that underlie their production, these language units are interpreted against the backgrounds in which they occur (in schools and universities). Moreover, the paper assesses the extent to which name givers’ temperamental traits affect unconventional onymic creation. The products of unofficial name giving can be stored for a short or long period of time, in a micro-community (the classroom or school) or a macro-community (nicknames that frequently occur beyond the confines of the institutional framework in which they were created). Some nicknames can even be studied diachronically (i.e. nicknames passed down to successive generations of users). Methodologically, this research is based on three methods (survey, observation, and experiment), which my students have helped to apply in schools and universities in north-western Romania, a multi-ethnic area.
