MORPHOLOGICAL AND SEMANTIC ASPECTS OF EPONYMS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Abstract

The term eponym has been used in literature to denote different linguistic phenomena: (1) a lexeme derived from a personal name; (2) the name from which such a lexeme is derived; (3) the person whose name is thus used; (4) any proper noun that has become a common noun, esp. brand names, e.g. xerox, Kleenex (sometimes also called 'proprietary eponyms') (cf. McArthur 1992). Lexemes treated as eponyms in this paper are those that have been formed from names of people, real of fictitious, by any of the word-formation processes.