Onim, proprium, nazwa własna. Terminology use in onomastics and the terminological potential of terminological forms

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to outline the potential of the basic Polish onomastic terminological forms (such as nazwa własna, nazwa, onim, proprium, and nomen proprium) in term-building reproduction and compare it with the actual current usage of terminology by onomasticians publishing in Polish. Additionally, an attempt is made to verify whether the assumed larger potential of the basic international form onim results in using terms with the stem -onim in Polish texts more frequently than (usually) synonymous multi-word Polish terms composed of the noun nazwa and an adjective referring to the category of named objects. A further goal is to measure whether terminological neologisms based on the stem -onim are adopted by numerous authors or rather their frequent use remains limited only to those who coined them. As far as the term-building reproductive potential is concerned, the methodology consisted in creating a table with potential terms based on the basic terminological forms listed above and created within the limits set by the word-building and syntactic rules of the Polish language. The potential assessed this way was compared with actual use empirically measured by means of a simple corpus compiled with the Sketch Engine and consisting of 134 articles published in the journal Onomastica between 2015 and 2023. In the quantitative analysis the following corpus-based inventories were deployed: 1) lemmas containing the character string onim, 2) z lemmas containing the character string propri, 3) concordances of nazw* własn* and nazwa własny, 4) concordances of the lemma onim, 5) concordances of the lemma proprium, and 6) concordances of the lemma propria. The results and findings comprise inter alia the following ones: the main and central concept of onomastics is referred to with the Polish term nazwa własna significantly more often than with the international expression onim. On the other hand, authors write more frequently in the journal Onomastica about antroponimy and antroponimia than about nazwa osobowa and nazwy osobowe. Finally, the reported research provided an empirical evidence of the clearly mixed (Polish and international) quality of Polish onomastic terminology.