New Onomastic Terms: Textual Criterion of Necessity

Overview & Synopsis

The article discusses a method for evaluating new onomastic terms, which includes two stages: the pre-textual stage and the textual one. The problem of textual criterion for assessing the need for new terms in onomastics is posed for the first time. To deal with it, the author turns to text linguistics and the theory of terminology and to the texts in which the term appears for the first time (the so-called terminology-generating texts) and offers the following parameters for evaluation: a) the distribution of terminology units in the text structure (in separate parts or passim); b) the presence of an explicative context for the term (definitions, etymon); c) the role of a new terminological unit in text cohesion (the presence of derivatives, hyper-hyponymic structures, recurrent chains). From these positions, specific terminological cases (viconym, hortensionym, trapezonym, restauronym, trophonym) are analyzed in texts written by onomasticians from Belarus and Russia. It is concluded that the compliance of the term with the textual evaluation criteria implies its transition from the status of a new term to the status of a commonly used one and, therefore, provides conditions for its terminographic fixation. At the same time, the aesthetic factor is still considered when evaluating a new term.