The use of hypocorisms and last names as a stand in for proper names

Abstract

Abstract The concern about what constitutes a proper name and its components has produced scientific articles in diverse fields from linguistics, to education, to sociology, to medicine. There is also abundant research about the presence of proper names in the repertoire of multiword expressions (MWEs) in different languages. However, there is an absence of studies in the literature that look at the use of a proper name as an MWE where a hypocorism takes the place of the original first name. This study addresses the MWE hypocorism + last name from a comparative perspective and explores its distributional patterns between American English and Mexican Spanish. A statistical analysis reveals that although this type of MWE is present in both languages, the distributional differences between them imply different usage connotations that should be taken into account when communicating in these languages.