Language Game in Ergonymic Nominations: Provocativeness and Emotional and Communicative Reception

The problem field of this article lies in the examination of the mechanisms of modelling and reading the codes of language game in the aspect of their emotional and evaluative impact (including negative) on an individual’s consciousness. The author refers to game nominations of different objects in Yekaterinburg. She proceeds from the theoretical provisions on the complex polycode (multimodal) nature of human emotions, which determines the need for a comprehensive (linguistic, psychological, and psycholinguistic) approach to the analysis of discursive practices of speech activity. The author focuses on the phenomenon of language game understood as a form of lingua-creative thinking based on associative mechanisms of destruction and switching of perception stereotypes, modelling, and using verbal signs. The decoding of the linguistic game unit involves the identification of its prototype and the awareness of a special linguistic technique for its transformation. From this point of view, decoding game ergonyms appears as a reflexive act in which emotional and evaluative projections of their perception manifest themselves. In the light of linguistic technique, the author distinguishes ergonymic linguistic createmes emphasising the emotional and evaluative charge of the motivators used, and game ergonyms modelled using the principles of associative provocation, associative identification, associative derivability, and associative overlay. The article considers ergonymic game units and linguistic createmes, respectively, in the light of pragmatic attitudes and emotional-evaluative vectors of influence on the consciousness of various urban population groups. Additionally, the author pays special attention to emotional-evaluative negative attitudes as planned or unplanned reactions of the nominee to the game ergonym or ergonymic linguistic createmes. Examples of the first type are provocative ergonyms that intentionally cause emotional shock (at primary perception); the second type of game ergonyms and ergonymic linguistic createmes does not imply a negative reaction of the addressee, but their perception encounters communicative barriers – linguistic, social, role-playing, psychological, ideological, aesthetic, etc. To check the positive or negative assessment of the respective nominations, the analysis uses data from psycholinguistic experiments conducted by the author by interviewing random respondents of different gender and age and social and professional status among urban residents. Finally, the author makes a conclusion regarding the zones of negative emotions in the game ergonymic continuum and outlines the prospects of an in-depth experimental study of the psychological reality of the perception of such nominations by bearers of urban culture.