Kollektive Bezeichnungen für bekannte Personen – Umriss eines Wortfeldes
Collective designations of known people – a sketch of a semantic field

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on collective names in the German language which are used to identify well-known people. In addition to proper names and individual common names, collective names offer themselves as another way of designating of persons. Since collective names used to designate people have formal similarities (they are nouns of singular form and plural meaning) and are very similar in their semantics (they refer to well-known people), their inventory is considered as a semantic field. Starting from an introduction into the nature of personal collective names in the German language and the concept of semantic field, selected German collective names of this kind are analzyed. At the center of the analysis is their lexicographic meaning, which is confronted with their useage tendencies in contexts. The study shows usage nuances of personal collective names in German.

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