Abstract:
This article analyses the offensive nominations of people in the short prose of Ivan Franko. In the margins of his fiction such stylistic functions as nominative, emotive, text-building and determinative are described. It was observed that nominative function is characteristic of all offensive words. Concerning the emotive function, it can be coined in a few situations: 1) when offensive language is used in the course of negative speech acts; 2) when due to intensive usage of offensive nominations the effect of pejorative gradation is achieved, when every next word intensifies the previous one; 3) when negative expressiveness is intensified by tautological nominations; 4) in case of contextual neutralisation (or leveling) of pejorativeness in offensive words, when offensive nomination is used in neutral or positive acts of speech. It was discovered that stylistic functions of offensive words in fiction can layer one onto another. Most frequently determinative function layers onto nominative and emotive functions.
