Functions of names in Romanian and foreign fairy tales – between cultural diversity and identity

: This paper is aimed at analysing the functions of names in Romanian and foreign fairy tales by highlighting similarities and differences of names in various cultures (English, French, German and Romanian). In comparison with names in real life, proper names in literature feature more functions than that of identification, as such names are varied from a semantic and structural perspective. The relationship between a name and its bearer is motivated; thus, literary names are generally more innovative and their structure is much more complicated than in the case of names in real life. One finds it impossible to talk about a set of stable functions of names in fairy-tale discourse, since it is impossible for one to separate their hierarchy from the text in which they appear. The functions of proper names in fairy tales are inferred by means of analogy based on the more general functions of verbal communication defined by Jakobson (1964: 88–94). In the framework of fairy-tale discourse, the functions are not independent, but actually depend on one another, as names in fairy tales are polyfunctional in themselves. Several functions occur: dominant (referential), as well as subjacent or latent (allusive, camouflage, localisation, didactic-educational, expressive, semantic and sociological) functions. The research framework of this paper is onomastics, but the approach is transdisciplinary. The methods belong to pragmatics, semantics and semiotics. The corpus was compiled from anthologies of folktales and modern fairy tales.