Afektonimy w najnowszej polszczyźnie

This paper touches upon contemporary Polish affective names as a specific lexical category. The paper discusses the material collected in Annex, which is to illustrate changes within the onomastic category under analysis. The analyses proposed by the author draw upon the dictionary of Terms of Endearment by Mirosław Basko and Agnieszka Zygmunt, published in 2010. The author also relies on the collection of intimate vocabulary extracted from the letters of some 20th-century writers to their loved ones. The corpus of affectionate names is analysed in terms of their grammatical and thematic status quo: the majority of cases are nouns and adjectives; morphologically – most of them are diminutives, hypocorisms and augmentatives. The author also focuses on the use of vulgarisms - sexual expressions in particular – in naming intimately close persons, and on affectionate names inspired by English, such as names of characters from famous films, cartoons or satirical series and dramas.