culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

EPONYMS: AN INSTANCE OF LINGUISTIC INTERCULTURALITY
exception to the rule is dr. Klára Falk-Bánó who, in an intervention at the
SIETAR Congress in Vienna in 2004, does tackle this topic. She pleas in favour
of the strong relationship between intercultural communication and language by
starting with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, revisited in order to discuss the role of
linguistic determinism in the understanding of culture. Linguistic determinism
holds an important position in the whole system or assembly suggested by
intercultural communication. “Intercultural communication is an
interdisciplinary area of study which inextricably intertwines psychological,
cultural, anthropological, sociolinguistic and linguistic data with one another
both in the field of scientific research and in practical education aspects” (Falk-
Bánó 2002: 2).
An important area of the interdependence of different aspects of
intercultural communication is the analysis of the interrelationship and the
interaction of cultural and linguistic factors. Thus, to account for the analysis of
the use of eponyms we shall refer, in quite a few words, to the linguistic
determinism. Wardhaugh (1993: 218) states that “the structure of a language
determines the way in which the speakers of the language in question view the
world, or a somewhat weaker version is that the structure does not determine the
world view but is still extremely influential in predisposing speakers of a
language towards adopting a particular world-view and when no linguistic sign
for that particular world-view exists, the process becomes more complex in that
it borrows both the world-view and the words to express it”.
To particularize, seen either from an everyday perspective or from a scientific
perspective, eponyms are, simply, one class of the ‘words which express the worldview’.
On Eponyms
Eponyms represent a particular and ever-growing category of words i.e.
those derived from proper names and which behave as common words assigned
to the lexical classes of nouns, verbs and very rarely adverbs.
Dictionaries describe eponym to have been used as an adjective as early as
mid-19 th century. In the mid-1990s, eponym was used to refer to (a) “a personal
name from which a word has been derived” (the source-eponym, in our
approach), (b) “the person whose name is so used” and (c) “the word so derived”
(McArthur 1996: 350).
In the last fifty years the term has been repeatedly used with a specific
meaning in lexicology, i.e. in the denomination of specialized dictionaries
explaining terms derived from proper names (personal names, most often).
Gradually subsumed to the linguistic terminology, eponyms have grown in
number and have become a resourceful contributor to the scientific lexicons and
terminologies.
Lexicologically, eponyms appear as ‘single word’ lexemes or as elements
in a huge number of collocations used in scientific terminologies, or even as part
of idiomatic constructions. They have become quite productive in the scientific
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