Abstract
The paper offers onomasiological view of formation and use of compound personal names in contemporary Czech communication. Therefore, analyses are based on excerpts from the Czech National Corpus (SYN).
Included are determinative compound names traditionally referred to as nouns of agents (nomina agentis), nouns of actors (nomina actoris), nouns of bearers of qualities (nomina attributiva) and nouns of bearers of a substance relation (e.g, vodoléčitel, zvonkohráč, polnohospodář, dřevosoustružník, megaboháč, euroslaboch, prvoženich, světoobčan, etc.). Compound names are compared to parallel derived names (especially productive suffixes are chosen in particular categories) in terms of their semantics (onomasiological and semantic functions of their constituent parts): compounds usually realize onomasiological structure more explicitly, their first constituent expresses one of possible semantic determinations of the base of the second constituent, e.g.
N+V: roman-o-pis-ec 'novelist; lit. novel-o-write-AGENT', moř-e-plav-ec 'seafarer; lit. sea-o-swim-AGENT' (composition + suffixation). Thus, compound names are presented according to morpheme and part-of-speech characteristics of the first constituent, its language origin and share, which they have in expressing the total meaning of the name or in its stylistic character.
Onomasiological base of compound personal names (i.e. relation of substance and action, substance and another substance, or substance and its attribute) is realized in various semantic meanings, attention is therefore paid to mutual compatibility of constituents of compounds and its changes in everyday communication. The newest personal names tend to use word-formative elements of foreign origin quite often (especially international elements and in hybrid-formation).
Corpus data are used to consider dynamics of contemporary Czech compounds.