On Czech expressive nominalizations of persons formed in the process of contamination (on the material of the Čeština 2.0 online dictionary)

Abstract

This article is devoted to the Czech expressive names of person that were created in the process of contamination. The source of the extracted material (64 units) is the online dictionary Čeština 2.0, which gives the users of the Internet the possibility to register linguistic units that were absent to the date from dictionaries and even those of their own authorship.   The author briefly describes the structure of Czech contaminatives, but focuses her attention primarily on their semantic characteristics and pragmatic potential.   The subject of the analysis is the units naming people in terms of their professional activities, views and behaviour related to the political sphere, human behaviour during the Covid-19 epidemic and human appearance and behaviour unrelated to the Covid-19 epidemic. The characteristics of nominations in question relates to the language game, the humour associated with it and the notion of play in Johan Huizinga’s terms.