Alberta Bela romānu valoda onomastikas skatījumā: derivatīvie un stilistiskie aspekti

In the history of Latvian literature, the work of the writer Alberts Bels (1938–2024) has been evaluated for its distinctive portrayal of human psychology, its characterisation of the relationship between the individual and society, and its depiction of the changing role of personality at historical turning points. However, the linguistic dimension of Bels’s literary works has received comparatively little scholarly attention. This article intends to address onomastic questions in the language of Bels’s novels, focusing on derivational and stylistic aspects. The article aims to analyse and reveal various onomastic solutions in Bels’s novels that significantly contribute to the creation of the overall artistic image. Within the linguistic analysis of the literary text, particular attention is devoted to derivational, stylistic, and poetonymic aspects. The structure of the article follows this plan: first, a brief overview of Bels’s corpus of novels is provided in relation to the historical context of the period; second, an insight into theoretical issues of poetonymy and cognitive onomastics is offered; third, the selection of personal names is analysed from a derivational perspective in relation to the impression created by the text; and fourth, the most striking examples of poetonymy are examined in greater depth. The methods used in the study include close linguistic reading of the novel texts, excerpting of language examples, the cognitive linguistics approach, and the analysis of theories and research practices in onomastics. The object of the study comprises all fourteen of Bels’s novels, from which approximately three hundred units have been excerpted. By applying the approach of cognitive onomastics, it has been possible to reveal the relationship between the personal names of several prominent characters and the impression created by the text, thereby expanding morphostylistic and lexicostylistic research in the linguistic analysis of literary works, an area that has so far been only rarely addressed in Latvian literary scholarship. The study provides insights into distinctive derivational, stylistic, and poetonymic aspects that play an important role in shaping the overall artistic image of a literary work.