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Nicknames are powerful indicators of attitudes towards gender categories and because of their transient and optional nature, it has been argued that they are more likely to show a closer relationship to ongoing trends in the culture and society than other more fixed parts of the language E. B. Phillips (1990) ["Nicknames and Sex Role Stereotypes," Sex Roles, VoL 23, pp. 281-289]. This study reports on a survey of nickname usage among a group of South African adolescents from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds (approximately 25% other than white) in an attempt to explicate gender-linked trends in frequency of occurrence, usage and attitudes to such special names. It reveals that conventions regarding nickname coinage and usage are intimately connected to the gender of bearers and users, and that more males have nicknames and coin them than females; it also shows significant sex-linked differences in the linguistic sources and users of nicknames, and reveals a greater tendency for female nicknames to function as indicators of affection rather than for humorous or critical effect. It could be argued that these trends could be linked to the nurturing and nurtured role of females in society, and to the differences in social power generally between males and females.
"Names mean something-not just in an etymological sense but in a synchronic sense. They carry important pragmatic meanings which color and even shape the character of human interaction" (Wierzbicka 1992:302). While parents in many Western cultures can choose the name of their child arbitrarily, which creates the impression that names have no stable pragmatic or attitudinal value at all, such a view is not supported by research, especially when it comes to morphological derivatives of first names and nickname coinages, which shows how versatile usage of the same name can be. The attitudinal meanings of names (and their use) may be structured in terms of prototypes rather than in terms of explicit emotional or attitudinal features, and these prototypes involve fundamental human categories based on age and gender.
According to Wierzbicka "a rigorous analysis of the semantics of names reveals to what extent different attitudes are linked in a given culture to different genders and to different age statuses, for example, to what extent overt displays of affection and similar feelings depend on...