Nikolenko O. Nicknames in the English language: semantic, structural, social, cultural peculiarities.

The thesis investigates semantic, structural and social cultural peculiarities of anthroponymic nicknames in the English language world picture. The paper focuses on the basic cognitive mechanisms of nickname nominations formation in the English language, analyzes such types of cognitive mechanisms as metaphors and metonymy coinage on the basis of nicknames that belong to different social groups, and also determines the cognitive models that express the type and kind of relations based on similarity and contiguity between basic and figurative meanings. Chapter I considers the formation and development of anthroponymic studies, the analysis of antroponymic nominations, methods of word-formation, categorization and conceptualization. In this paper we focus on different word formation processes to describe the appeared names of people in modern English. With the rapid development of information technology, as well as the growth of social networks, linguistic innovations are constantly being created and their usages have become an inevitable phenomenon. The created nominations are very flexible in terms of further derivation. They may contain both archaic and newly devised affixes due to alternative rules of morphology as the innovative process is based on creative analogy. Telescopic word formation or blending is a frequent and one of the most productive word-formation processes. A considerable number of telescopic person nominations appear involving the coinage of a new lexeme by fusing parts of at least two other source words of which either one is shortened in the fusion and/or where there is some form of phonemic or graphemic overlap of the source words.