Proper names as special signs of any language exist in different forms and present an opensystem which is expanding and shrinking permanently. The expansion of the proper name stockis easily explained by new ways of nomination, new objects to be named, new fashion for extrav-agant names, like naming children Facebook or Twitter, as it used to be with Sputnik or othernewly emerged notions. But the system of proper names is also transforming inside and shrinkingwhen some names fall out of use, or they transform into common names through an intermediarystage of being connotonyms. In this paper I would like to dwell upon some ways of name trans-formation concentrating on the semantics of a poetonym with a vast semantic structure, havingbecome legendary and widely referred to, played with and used for remaking of all kinds, thename of the Prince of Denmark, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.As soon as the aim of the paper is to discuss the semantic changes of this proper name, Iwould like to focus of the starting points and general approach to the semantics and meaning of aproper name used here. It would be only natural if we look at proper names as at a narrative, acontainer of all kinds of knowledge about the referent. In doing so it is necessary to stick to a gen-erally broad approach to the semantics, including the meaning of a word. The broad concept ofsemantics supported by O. Jespersen, L. Shcherba, S. Katstselson and others is based on theidea that apart from a linguistic meaning expressing the dictionary, so to say, components ofmeaning, any word especially proper names have extralingual meanings comprising all the infor-mation humanity knows about the referent of the word. The more famous the referent is thegreater is the number of meanings its semantics includes, therefore the artistic potential of such aproper name is much higher compared to others. There are no rigid boundaries between a purelylinguistic and an encyclopedic meanings of a proper name, as both of them are closely connect-ed. Only knowing the referent of a name we can state what its primary lexical meaning is: e.g.only the knowledge of typical male and female names of a certain nation gives us a chance tostate the meaning of John as ‘human, male’ and Mary as ‘human, female’; as well as being awareof why Hamlet was in Shakespeare’s play we can make a conclusion as the lexical meaning ofthis poetonym is ‘human, male, noble’, etc. Using the lexical meaning of a name as a startingpoint for describing the complete semantic structure we can make it complete and clear-cut forunderstanding and analysis. As we can notice, a purely lexical meaning which any proper namepossesses is extremely poor, so poor that makes linguists argue if it really has any meaning,though extralingual information about the referent of an onym so firmly sticks to it that they be-come indivisible, and the additional encyclopedic meanings turn to be a part of a proper namesemantics.Any artistic text actualizes is actually living only under condition of its interpretation by a reader.This triangle of an author, a text and a reader is a mandatory symbiosis for a literary text to be-come meaningful and significant for future generations. Therefore, semantics in its broad meaning include all the information a speaker brings up producing a statement (in our case, an author cre-ating artistic images through literary texts) which needs to be perceived by a listener (or reader) to interpret it correctly. Read more:
(PDF) INTERSEMIOTIC AND INTERLINGUAL FACTORS OF SEMANTIC CHANGES IN PROPER NAMES: CASE STUDY OF HAMLET AS A PROPER NAME. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341520748_INTERSEMIOTIC_AND_INTERLINGUAL_FACTORS_OF_SEMANTIC_CHANGES_IN_PROPER_NAMES_CASE_STUDY_OF_HAMLET_AS_A_PROPER_NAME [accessed May 02 2025].