VOLKER KOHLHEIM

Bayreuth

Research fields: name theory, anthroponomastics, hodonymy, literary onomastics.

ONYMIC AMBIGUITY IN LITERATURE

Onymic ambiguity in literature

ABSTRACT

Ambiguity is a key concept in modern poetics. Although there are different views on the concept of literary ambiguity, I would like to follow William Empson’s classic definition, according to which ambiguity exists whenever a verbal nuance, however subtle, permits alternative responses to one and the same piece of language. The following will seek not only to show that ambiguity can also extend to literary names, but also to distinguish between different types of onymic ambiguity in literary texts. Finally, it will ask what the analysis of poetonymic ambiguity can reveal about the cognitive processing of proper names.

KEYWORDS: ambiguity, onymic ambiguity, literary names (poetonyms), cognitive studies.

ANNOTATION

Ambiguity is a key concept in modern poetics. Though there exist different concepts of literary ambiguity, I prefer to adhere to William Empson’s classical definition according to which any verbal nuance allowing alternative reactions to the same piece of language may be regarded as ambiguous. This paper not only intends to show that ambiguity can also extend to literary names, but it tries to differentiate between various kinds of onymic ambiguity in literary texts and asks what we may learn from poetonymic ambiguity about the mental processing of proper names.

KEYWORDS: Ambiguity, onymic ambiguity, literary names, cognitivistics.

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Within linguistics, there is broad agreement on the concept of ambiguity: ambiguity is the “clearly describable multiplicity of meaning of a word or a larger linguistic unit” (Bauer 2008: 17). A distinction must be made between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity. The former occurs at the word level, where a distinction can be made (though not always entirely sharply) between homonymy and polysemy. Structural ambiguity occurs when a complex linguistic unit, usually a sentence, can be interpreted in different ways. While in normal everyday communication ambiguity is hardly ever noticed or is immediately resolved (disambiguated), it plays a major role in poetics and has, indeed, become a key concept of modern poetics; Roman Jakobson sees in it the essence of the poetic (Jakobson 1960: 371; Nöth 2000: 451). As Jan Mukařovský (1989) has observed, the importance of ambiguity to the literary work of art stems from the fact that although the linguistic sign in literature does not entirely lose its relation to extra-aesthetic reality, reference in the work of art is not made as unambiguously as is the norm in the real world (see also Kohlheim 2006a: 274–80). Nevertheless, the concept of ambiguity in literary theory is by no means as clearly defined as it is in linguistics. Thus, in her dissertation devoted to the subject of literary ambiguity, Shlomith Rimmon wishes to speak of ambiguity only when two possible readings are mutually exclusive, as in Henry James’s famous story The Turn of the Screw: either there are ghosts at Bly or there are no ghosts, yet both readings are possible (Rimmon 1977: 11). By contrast, Abraham Kaplan and Ernst Kris (1948: 417–421) identify five different kinds of aesthetic ambiguity: disjunctive ambiguity, additive ambiguity, conjunctive ambiguity, integrative ambiguity und projective ambiguity. William Empson, too, who defines ambiguity as an essential feature of poetic language in his book Seven Types of Ambiguity, proceeds from a broad definition of the concept of ambiguity. He proposes that ambiguity should be said to occur “whenever any verbal nuance, however slight, gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”¹ Proper names can also be understood as a “piece of language,” piece of language; indeed, proper names are particularly prone to ambiguities and produce them in very different ways. Some of these ways of creating ambiguity do not differ in the literary work of art

¹ Empson (1966: 1): “I propose to use the word [ambiguity] in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”

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from the way they do so in real life, while others are confined to the aesthetic sphere. The following is an attempt to systematize the different kinds of poetonymic ambiguity, using examples from German- and English-language literature.

The first example is a case in which there is uncertainty as to whether a lexeme is being used as a proper name or (still) as a common noun at all. Oscar Wilde’s play title The Importance of Being Earnest (1893) can serve as an example here, but this kind of ambiguity will not be pursued further. Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg presents us with a quite different kind of ambiguity. The Franconian knight Walther von Stolzing has just managed to exchange a few words after the service with Eva, the beautiful daughter of the goldsmith Pogner. Eva’s nurse Magdalene is greatly surprised by the understanding that has arisen so quickly between Eva and Walther, since the two met for the first time only the day before. Eva justifies herself with the words (Wagner 1978 [1867]: 404):

That is what caused me such swift distress, that I had long since seen him in the picture! Tell me, did he not approach just like David?

Magdalene is aghast, for she herself is in love with a David, the apprentice David. “Are you mad? Like David?” she cries out jealously. But Eva reassures her: “Like David in the picture.” Magdalene now believes that Eva is referring by the name David to the psalmist David, whom the Mastersingers revere as their patron saint: “Ah! – do you mean the king with the harp / and long beard on the Masters’ shield?” But Eva does not, of course, mean this King David; rather, she is thinking of the youthful, radiant hero:

No! The one who hurled the stone at Goliath, sword at his belt, sling in hand, his head haloed with bright curls, as Master Dürer painted him for us!

Whereupon Magdalene, now referring once again to her own David, sighs with relief: “Ah, David! David!” (Wagner 1978 [1867]: 404; see also Kohlheim, Kohlheim 2013).

Clearly, this is a case of referential ambiguity, which rests on the much-discussed fact that a name as a linguistic sign, as a “proprial lemma” in Willy Van Langendonck’s (2007) terminology, can refer to an unlimited number of referents (see Windberger-Heidenkummer 2011).

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For the logician David Kaplan, the proper name is therefore fundamentally ambiguous.² However, and this is what makes the example interesting from the perspective of the philosophy of language as well, the fictional entity Eva here refers to a historical figure from the real world as depicted by Dürer, namely the biblical David, who defeated Goliath. The fictional entity Magdalene, by contrast, initially applies the proper-name lemma David to a person from the fictional world to which Eva and Magdalene themselves belong—the apprentice David—only to realize with relief that the historical person, King David, was meant. The assignments of reference for the fictional persons thus proceed without difficulty both within the fictional world and beyond it, an aspect that can be mentioned here but not explored further.³

Proper names can also be ambiguous in various respects in and of themselves, per se. Thus, it is not always clear from the outset whether a name refers to a male or female bearer, or whether it denotes a person, an animal, or even a place. The question of whether categorical meanings or presuppositions necessarily belong to the proper name, or whether they are merely statistical observations contingently associated with it, is disputed.⁴ Circumstances also differ from one language to another. The fact remains, however, that writers readily exploit ambiguities of this kind. I would like to speak here of inherent onymic ambiguity. It is obvious that this kind of ambiguity is not confined to literature. In German literature, the archetype of the girl standing between childhood and maturity is Mignon. Yet Mignon is not initially a name; it is a French adjective used as a noun, meaning approximately ‘darling’.⁵ Like the German word, the foreign word Mignon could in Goethe’s time be applied to both male and female persons. A 1800 review said of the actress Caroline Jagemann: “She soon became the public’s Mignon” (commentary on Goethe 1977 [1795/96]: 719). This gender-ambiguous designation thus perfectly accords with Mignon’s androgynous nature; when Wilhelm Meister first catches sight of her, he “could not decide whether to declare her a boy or a girl” (Goethe 1977 [1795/96]: 86). Mignon herself also persistently resists “attempts to fix her femininity:”

² Kaplan (1989: 563): „Unlike indexals like ‘I’ proper names really are ambiguous.“

³ Within the framework of possible-worlds theory, “trans-world identity” is discussed, among others, by Doležel (1998: 17–18); Ronen (1994: 57–60); Kripke (2013: 81f.).

⁴ Vgl. hierzu Anderson (2007: 135f.); Van Langendonck (2007: 71f.); Coates (2012: 125–129).

⁵ See commentary on Goethe (1977 [1795/96]: 719); Schwanke (1992: 354–359).

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“I am a boy: I will not be a girl!”” (Wetzel 1989: 329). The ambiguity of Mignon extends not only to the question of sex, but also to the linguistic status of the sign: introduced as a common noun, Mignon nevertheless becomes something like a proper name for the child as the novel’s plot unfolds, especially since the child persistently refuses to reveal its actual name.⁶ By now, Mignon has even become an established female given name in German (Seibicke 2000: 327); the masculine French word has thus undergone a change of gender.

The twelve-year-old protagonist of Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding, first published in 1946, is also at this unsettling in-between stage: her hair is cut like a boy’s (McCullers 2008: 8), and she wishes to be a boy and to be able to go to war.⁷ Unlike Mignon, this “tomboy” does have a name, initially the gender-ambiguous pet name Frankie. It is revealing that, when she occasionally grows tired of her in-between state, she also gets tired of her name: “This was the summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie” (McCullers 2008: 29). Accordingly, in Part II of the novel she decides to have business cards made bearing the imposing name Miss F. Jasmine Addams, Esq. (McCullers 2008: 61), only to be mentioned in Part III, at the end of the novel, disillusioned but also matured, by the unambiguously female first name Frances (McCullers 2008: 167 and elsewhere).

Gender-ambiguous names are much more common in English than in German, where they occur in informal usage almost exclusively as hypocoristics. Nevertheless, many of these names tend toward one gender or the other, for example the name Robin toward the masculine. Thus, in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work, the industrialist Vic Wilcox expects a male academic when he is told that Robyn Penrose will be “shadowing” him at work as part of an academic project. His astonishment when a young woman appears before him is accordingly considerable (Lodge 1989: 106f.). It was a dictionary of given names that gave David Lodge the idea of developing a comic scene out of the gender ambiguity of the name Robin/Robyn; at the same time, he felt that the “androgynous” name Robyn suited his feminist, self-assured heroine very well (Lodge 2011: 38).

⁶ Goethe (1977 [1795/96]: 522): Mignon has “sworn an oath [...] not to disclose to any living person the whereabouts of her dwelling or the place of her origin.”

⁷ McCullers (2008: 30f). Der Roman spielt während des Zweiten Weltkriegs in einer Kleinstadt in Georgia/USA.

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In contrast to real life, a name whose original lexical meaning remains recognizable automatically becomes “speaking” in a literary work. This is explained by the fact that, in the case of a name in a literary work of art, we must assume that the author chose it intentionally; it is never attached to its bearer by chance. Consequently, we find speaking names—the term comes from Lessing—as early as antiquity (Birus 1987: 40). Although the speaking name often enough expresses what actually characterizes its bearer, as is the case with John Fielding’s Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones (1749), speaking names were also used ironically or in an oppositional sense from an early date. Thus, the Angelo in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604; Act III, 2, 249–254) is anything but angelical. It is this ever-possible ironic or antithetical use that renders speaking names ambiguous from the outset, since it is generally only in the course of the narrative that we can discover whether a semantically transparent name lives up to what it promises. A fine example of this ambiguity is Mittler in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften: introduced at first as a thoroughly successful mediator,⁸ he nevertheless fails with Eduard and Charlotte.

While the ambiguity of the speaking name is largely maintained here, Theodor Fontane, a master of ironic naming, tends to resolve this onymic ambiguity immediately—or, in fact, not to allow it to arise at all. Thus, at a dinner he is hosting, Privy Councillor Treibel comments on two ladies: “Two ladies from the court; the stout one: Frau Majorin von Ziegenhals, the notstout one [...]: Fräulein Edwine von Bomst” (Fontane 1969 [1892]: 23). Irony, as Roland Barthes puts it (1974: 66), “always proceeds from a secure position.” Here, that position is established by the unequivocal statement about the corpulence of the two ladies. As if that were not enough, Treibel goes on about Ziegenhals’s considerable bust and philosophizes: “Besides, these are the amusing contradictions that make life cheerful. Klopstock was a poet, and another man, whom I knew personally, was called Griepenkerl” (Fontane 1969 [1892]: 24). It should be added that von Bomst exerts its suggestive effect not as a genuinely speaking name, but as a sound-symbolic one.⁹ In Frau Jenny Treibel as well, the governess Fräulein Honig appears, of whom it is immediately said that

⁸ Goethe (1977 [1809]: 255): „Solange er im Dienste war, hatte sich kein Ehepaar scheiden lassen [...].“

⁹ Man vergleiche hierzu auch Demetz (1964: 194).

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“her harsh features seemed like a protest against her name.”¹⁰ As soon as irony enters the picture, there is no room for ambiguity. This also applies to names in literary works of art.

If, in these cases, it is their pre-proprial semantics that makes names “speak,” a name can also draw attention to its bearer’s concealed or contradictory character traits by having previously belonged to known individuals, whether prominent figures from extratextual reality or literary characters.¹¹ Here, the name derives its meaning from the intertextual references inherent in it. This does not always happen as conspicuously as with Napoleon Fischer, the Social Democratic, trade-union-organized master mechanic in Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan, about whom the reader naturally immediately wonders whether he lives up to the claims implied by this name. Fontane is far more discreet in Irrungen, Wirrungen, whose protagonist bears the name Lene, a short form of the biblical name Maria Magdalena, which oscillates between sin and holiness. In Wilhelm Raabe’s novel Unruhige Gäste, the intertextual ambiguity inherent in the name Phöbe even becomes relevant to the plot: When the young student Veit von Bielow first hears the female first name Phöbe in a fellow student’s attic room, it sounds to him “only sweetly Hellenic,” and so he “cheerfully calls it out to the crescent moon above the rooftops on a German spring night” (Raabe 1961 [1885]: 190). In its “Hellenic” context, the name Phöbe refers to Phoibos Apollon (Böschenstein 1986: 28, n. 55), but also to the virgin moon goddess Artemis, who also bears the epithet Phöbe or the Radiant (Lensing 1988: 162). The reference to the “crescent moon” in Raabe’s text is unmistakable. But when Veit von Bielow, who is mortally ill at the end of the novel, not least because of his acquaintance with Phöbe, unexpectedly invokes the goddess “Persephoneia [...]” in a letter (Raabe 1961 [1885]: 333), “the goddess of the underworld, whose name is etymologically traced back to the moon and who is often placed beside Artemis as her companion” (Lensing 1988:162), these mythological-onymic references make evident the theme of Eros and Thanatos that the author has banished to the subtext (Lensing 1988: 163). The theme is banished and tabooed here insofar as the mythological association of the name Phöbe in the manifest text is immediately overwritten in favor of another, namely a biblical association

¹⁰ Fontane (1969 [1892]: 33). Terminologisch herrscht hinsichtlich derartiger Namen noch Unsicherheit. Hengst/Sobanski (2000) sprechen hier von „konträren Namen“, Hengst/Vasil’eva (2007: 151) vom lying name. Das Entstehen von Komik durch derartige Namen erklärt Pohl (2005) mittels kognitivistischer Konzepte.

¹¹ Die literarische Onomastik spricht hier von „verkörperten Namen“; vgl. Birus (1987: 45).

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by the fact that Phöbe is also the name of that “servant of the church in Cenchreae” whom the Apostle Paul recommends to the Roman congregation as “our sister,” probably as the bearer of his letter (Rom. 16.1; Raabe 1961 [1885]: 190). Hence some interpreters regard Phöbe entirely as “the sister”: “Sisterly are Phoebe’s functions in the house of her biological brother; ‘sisterly’ too are her duties in the village.”¹² Ultimately, however, the ambiguity of her name between Greek-mythological and Christian associations reflects the inner contradictoriness of a character who, as one of the foremost Raabe scholars of our time has put it, “is not an easy character to read” (Sammons 1987: 246).

Since approximately the fourteenth/fifteenth century in Germany, and in England as well, first and family names have formed a person’s “full name.”¹³ There are quite a number of German and English family names formed from given names without any formal alteration, such as Friedrich, Lukas, Werner.¹⁴ The writer Bodo Kirchhoff, for example, exploits the ambiguity arising from the lack of any marker distinguishing the family name at the beginning of his novel Infanta, set in the Philippines: “The German [...] suddenly introduced himself as Lukas. ‘Mister Lukas Kurt?’ — ‘Mister Kurt Lukas.’ — ‘Then your first name was on the sticker.’ — ‘Someone made a mistake. Like you’” (Kirchhoff 1990: 7). Yet authors have further and more textually significant opportunities for onymic ambiguity, arising from the two components of a full name, which can then become literarily productive—for instance, when first and last names contrast with one another in some way. The prime example of such a “divided” (Presch 2002: 3f. and passim) or “antithetical” name (Demetz 1964: 197–201) is Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903). The antithetical quality of the two name components here rests on the linguistic-geographical markedness of Tonio as a Romance, and thus “southern,” name, and Kröger as a Low German, and thus “northern,” name.¹⁵ Taken together, these names, marked in this way, create an ambiguity that is constitutive of the conflict-ridden character of the protagonist of Mann’s novella. But Thomas Mann was by no means the first to use this onymic stylistic device; in this respect he follows quite closely in the footsteps of Theodor Fontane, who in Effi Briest describes a “[...] little, stoop-shouldered and almost already

¹² Höhler (1969: 131). Signifikanterweise tritt Phebe auch als Schwester Holden Caulfields in J. D. Salingers Roman The Catcher in the Rye (1951) auf.

¹³ Der Terminus nach Seibicke (2008: 10, 14f.).

¹⁴ Vgl. zur Entstehung dieser Familiennamen Kohlheim (2000).

¹⁵ Nach Birus (1987: 45) handelt es sich hierbei um „klassifizierende“ Namen.

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“almost fused with [the] gentleman, who at the same time had something so distinguished about him [...]”, gives the name Alonzo Gieshübler. Fontane enjoys having his characters comment on conspicuous names, as does Thomas Mann, for that matter, and so Effi aptly remarks when the pharmacist Alonzo Gieshübler is introduced to her: “And then I can see at once that you are different from others. [...] Perhaps it is also the name that plays a part in your case. That was always a favorite contention of our old pastor Niemeyer; he liked to say that a name, especially a baptismal name, had something mysteriously determining about it, and Alonzo Gieshübler, I think, opens up an entirely new world before one, yes, I would almost venture to say, Alonzo is a romantic name, a preciosity of a name.” – “Yes, my most gracious lady,” Gieshübler replies, “you’ve hit the nail on the head” (Fontane 1969 [1895]: 64f.). The “preciosity of a name” Alonzo points to Spain, where Gieshübler’s mother actually comes from, and thus to the Quixotic aspect of this character, who would most like to “fight and die” for Effi “as a Cid or some other Campeador” (Fontane 1969 [1895]: 66), while the family name, which recalls a Bohemian mineral water (Demetz 1964: 199), represents the bourgeois element of this pharmacist, who is also proud that the Gieshüblers have been resident pharmacists “for four generations now, a full hundred years” (Fontane 1969 [1895]: 65; see also Demetz 1964: 199).

Alonzo Gieshübler embraces the ambiguity of his name and makes fruitful use of it. Quite different is the music teacher and composer Niels Wrschowitz from Fontane’s last novel, Der Stechlin. Niels Wrschowitz suffers so deeply from his antithetical name that he “became a doctor out of a kind of despair” (Fontane 1969 [1899]: 130). The issue is not, as one might expect, primarily the linguistic-geographical antithesis of his full name, composed of a Danish and a Czech element,¹⁶ but rather an aversion to the first name Niels that can be explained only by his individual biography, and which was also borne by the Danish composer Niels Gade, whom he despised. “Niels Gade,” Fontane writes, “was for him the epitome of everything trivial and insignificant [...], and so he hit upon the idea of making the title of doctor on his card erase his first name” (Fontane 1969 [1899]: 131f.). Here, too, it becomes clear that Fontane tends to resolve onymic ambiguities as quickly as possible in favor of some kind of unambiguity.

Fontane, however, was not the first to make productive use of the ambiguity of one of his characters’ full names. Among his predecessors, Jean Paul deserves particular mention: in his novel Des Feldpredigers, published in 1809,

¹⁶ Demetz (1964: 200): „Wrschowitz war zur Zeit Fontanes das Wedding des tschechischen Prag“.

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Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz captures the inner conflict of its protagonist, Attila Schmelzle, through the ambiguity of his full name. In stark contrast to the historical person of the leader of the Huns, whom one inevitably associates with the name Attila, this field chaplain is distinguished by excessive timidity, a character trait conveyed, in multiple ways, by his family name Schmelzle: the name Schmelzle evokes softness both through its sound symbolism and through its echo of the common noun Schmalz, while this impression is further reinforced by the diminutive suffix -le, which is identifiable as Swabian on linguistic-geographical grounds and sounds endearing, at least to non-Swabians. He himself, of course, believes that “the guardian spirit of the baptismal name Attila has entered into me more than is proper” (Jean Paul 1987 [1809]:16). This view is in turn relativized by his young, capable wife Teutoberga, his “good wife Bergelchen” (Jean Paul 1987 [1809]: 22), as he calls her, when she calls him her “charming Attel” (Jean Paul 1987 [1809]: 24) or her “much-too-good little Attel” (Jean Paul 1987 [1809]: 58). These variations and jeux d’esprit with names must not, of course, obscure the fact that beneath the comic mask, the person of Attila Schmelzle negotiates an ultimately tragic inner conflict between aspiration and reality, already clearly expressed in the ambiguity of his name (see also Kohlheim 2006b: 441–445).

Having shown that poetonymic ambiguity is an essential literary device, we may conclude by asking what the possibility of employing onymic ambiguity tells us about the nature of the proper name and its cognitive processing. “Valuable allies,” Freud once explained, “are the poets,” for “in the study of the mind [...] they are far ahead of us ordinary people [...]” (Freud 2010: 9). We may assume that they can provide us with insights not only into psychological states but also into cognition. To begin with, examples such as Frau Majorin von Ziegenhals and Fräulein Edwine von Bomst make clear how the literary character is essentially constituted in the reader’s brain through the mention of proper names (see Kohlheim 2007); we need know nothing more about these two ladies, and yet we form a fairly concrete image of them. Fontane does try to reverse the concepts of the skinny Majorin von Ziegenhals and the plump Fräulein von Bomst that have presumably first formed in the brains of all readers, but he succeeds only with difficulty, if at all; every reader of the novel can put this to the test. The fact that the image of a skinny Majorin von Ziegenhals takes hold so quickly and firmly in the brain, even in defiance of Fontane’s text, is due to the fact that, as the cognitive research approach of embodied cognition

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has found that, in the cognitive processing of animal designations, predominantly visual brain areas become active, while prototypical images of the animals mentioned are simulated (Rickheit, Weiss, Eikmeyer 2010: 110). As Inge Pohl has shown, the comedy intended by Fontane here arises from the contrast between culturally guided recipient expectations (“experiential world 1”), which hold that a speaking name lives up to what it promises, and the text world, which is structured in the opposite way (“experiential world 2”): “The recipient has to infer an unexpected, conflicting experiential world 2” (Pohl 2005: 415). Authors also know that, in their readers’ brains, as soon as a name is mentioned, an idea arises as to whether it refers to a female or male person. In any case, following Van Langendonck (2013: 104f.), they take into account the categorical meanings of proper names stored in their readers’ semantic memory (following Tulving 2002), and exploit the effects of surprise when a name does not conform to the prototypical pattern, as David Lodge does with his female character

Robyn. The mention of names such as Alonzo Gieshübler, Niels Wrschowitz or Attila Schmelzle, in turn, activates encyclopedic knowledge stored in readers’ semantic memory (Rickheit, Weiss, Eikmeyer 2010: 36f.), whether of a name-typological and geographical kind, as with the first two names, or of a historical kind, as with Attila Schmelzle.

LITERATURE

LITERARY TEXTS

Fontane Theodor 1969 [1892]: Frau Jenny Treibel. – Nymphenburger Fontane-Ausgabe 11. München: Nymphenburger.

Fontane Theodor 1969 [1895]: Effi Briest. – Nymphenburger Fontane-Ausgabe 12. München: Nymphenburger.

Fontane Theodor 1969 [1899]: Der Stechlin. – Nymphenburger Fontane-Ausgabe 13. München: Nymphenburger.

Goethe Johann Wolfgang von 1977 [1795/96]: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. – Goethes Werke VII. 9., Aufl., hrsg. von E. Trunz. München: C. H. Beck.

Goethe Johann Wolfgang von 1977 [1809]: Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Ein Roman. – Goethes Werke VI. 9., Aufl., hrsg. von Erich Trunz. München: C. H. Beck.

Jean Paul 1987 [1809]: Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz. – Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, Abt. I, Bd. 6, 4., Aufl., hrsg. von Norbert Miller. München: Hanser.

Kirchhoff Bodo 1990: Infanta. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp.

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Lodge David 1989: Nice Work. London: Penguin.

McCullers Carson 2008 [1946]: The Member of the Wedding. London: Penguin.

Raabe Wilhelm 1961 [1885]: Unruhige Gäste. Ein Roman aus dem Säkulum. – W. Raabe. Sämtliche Werke 16. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Wagner Richard 1978 [1867]: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. – R. Wagner. Die Musikdramen. München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 399–503.

FURTHER LITERATURE

Anderson John M. 2007: The Grammar of Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barthes Roland 1974: Die Lust am Text. Aus dem Französischen von Traugott König. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bauer Matthias 2008: Ambiguität. – Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ansätze – Personen – Grundbegriffe, hrsg. von A. Nünning. 4. Aufl. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 17.

Birus Hendrik 1987: Vorschlag zu einer Typologie literarischer Namen. – LiLi. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 17(67), 38–51.

Böschenstein Renate 1986: Mythologie zur Bürgerzeit. Raabe – Wagner – Fontane. – Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft, 7–34.

Coates Richard 2012: Eight Issues in the Pragmatic Theory of Properhood. – Acta Linguistica Lithuanica 66, 119–140.

Demetz Peter 1964: Formen des Realismus: Theodore Fontane. Kritische Untersuchungen. München: Hanser.

Doležel Lubomír 1998: Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press.

Empson William 1966: Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions.

Freud Sigmund 2010: Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens „Gradiva“. – Sigmund Freud: „Der Dichter und das Phantasieren“, hrsg. von O. Jahraus. Schriften zur Kunst und Kultur, Stuttgart: Reclam, 7–100.

Hengst Karlheinz, Sobanski Ines 2000: Eigennamen als Strukturelemente im literarischen Text. – English in the Modern World. Festschrift for Hartmut Breitkreuz on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (= Foreign Language Studies 5). Frankfurt a. Main: Peter Lang, 79–101.

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Hengst Karlheinz, Vasil’eva Natalia 2007: Naming in Texts. Literary Onomastics as Integration in Text Linguistics. – Nominalization, Nomination and Naming, ed. by Ch. Todenhagen, W. Thiele. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 145–156.

Höhler Gertrud 1969: Unruhige Gäste. Das Bibelzitat in Wilhelm Raabes Roman (= Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft 85). Bonn: Bouvier u. Co.

Jakobson Roman 1960: Linguistics and Poetics. – Style in Language, ed. by Th. A. Sebeok. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 350–377.

Kaplan Abraham, Kris Ernst 1948: Esthetic Ambiguity. – Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8, 415–435.

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Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXII

Onymische Ambiguität in der Literatur

Onymic Ambiguity in Literature

S U M M A R Y

Semantic ambiguity is a key concept in contemporary poetics. Of the many different conceptions of semantic ambiguity in literature, this article draws on William Empson’s classic definition of the phenomenon. According to this definition, any segment of language that implies different understandings of the information conveyed is to be regarded as ambiguous. The aim of this article is not only to establish the connection between semantic ambiguity and literary names, but also to identify the semantic variation of different onyms that occurs in works of fiction. It also analyzes the influence of poetic semantic ambiguity on the particularities of proper-name usage.

Received on January 18, 2015.

V O L K E R K O H L H E I M

Schlosshof Birken 11, D–95447 Bayreuth, Deutschland

[email protected]

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