A Study On Aptronym In Literature

The studies on character and character name have existed for a long time in all over the world. However, when it comes to the study on aptronym, people can not find more. Aptronym is a figure of speech, which was defined by David Crambs as"a name of befitting the occupation, role, or nature of a person or character. It is widely used in literary works for the sake of humor or sarcasm". When a character, for example, whose manner is self-controlled, is called Mr. Prim, it is an aptronym. When a sophisticated person is called Mr. Worldly Wiseman, it is another case of aptronym. As a figure of speech, aptronym is frequently used in literary works and it leads to the achievement of special rhetorical functions for its novelty and particularity. However, the author found few of the researchers have explored aptronym systematically. This paper, after dealing with the formation of aptronym, makes a multi-sided analysis of aptronym in the perspectives of pragmatics, cognition and rhetoric.The thesis is made up of six parts. Part one is an introduction to the thesis, including the reasons and purpose of choosing such topic. Also, it provides the construction of the thesis. Chapter one states the general view of aptronym, and the relations and distinctions between aptronym and personal name. In the author's opinion, in contrast to the purely symbolic personal names, aptronyms in literature are usually attached with certain meanings. Chapter two analyzes the formation of aptronym in literature—lexical device and psychological device. Chapter three consists of three subsections: it firstly applies relevance theory to the pragmatic analysis of aptronym in literature; secondly it analyzes aptronym from a cognitive view—the generation of aptronym and lastly it discusses the high memory value of aptronym. Chapter four mainly discusses the rhetorical function of aptronym in literature. The last part draws a conclusion that Aptronyms intentionally given by the authors can help readers get a better understanding of the whole work. It can be studied from the different perspectives of linguistics. In a word, aptronym is a unique language phenomenon, the interpretation and understanding of which should deserve the attention of language learners as well as the language researchers, thus paving the way for further researches.