ABSTRACT
Proper names, particularly the act of naming, is a well-established research topic in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, history, law, linguistics, philosophy, social psychology and sociology. There is even a series of International Congresses of Onomastic Sciences where researchers from various disciplines meet to discuss their work on proper names. For instance, the XVIIIth International Congress (held in April 1993 at the University of Trier, Germany) was mainly devoted to the study of one category of proper names: family names. The programme of this congress mentions no less than ten different colloquia which were scheduled to provide a panorama of the current trends in research on proper names. These colloquia dealt with topics like the interdependence of naming and social structure in various cultures (socio-onomastics); intercultural comparison of proper name systems; the relations between cultural history and the choice of a name; the poetics of name-giving or the logical status of literary names (literary onomastics); proper names, and lexicography, legal aspects of naming, or ‘deonomastics’, i.e. the study of words which have been formed on the basis of proper names (for instance, the French word ‘poubelle’ (dustbin) is derived from the name of Eugène René Poubelle, a prefect who ordered the use of dustbins in 1884).
