Ekspresywne nazwy osób w języku licealistów i studentów białostockich

Abstract

This paper is concerned with expressive vocabulary used by high school students and university students in Bialystok. It focuses on names denoting people, paying particular attention to those terms which have not been recorded in any dictionaries of general Polish. The items in question have been collected by means of questionnaires, and analysed in terms of their semantic and morphological properties. Attention has been given to such ways of enriching the lexicon as neologisms, borrowings and the employment of linguistic stereotypes. The author’s findings enable the identification of the mechanisms which are responsible for the creation of such expressive terms; they also reveal the most popular and fashionable names used by the young people. This paper demonstrates that the majority of expressive names used by high school and university students are pejorative in character. The names they use are often disrespectful, ironic and or vulgar; those of a positive character are substantially less common.