Вторичная номинация лица путем метафоризации зоонима (на материале русского и болгарского языков)

The paper looks at the formation of secondary nomination of people, derived from the names of animals. The derived meaning of the zoonyms is related to the basic, motivational meaning and the animal sememes of the basic meaning are transformed into features, characterizing the person. Zoomorphism preserves the semantic components of the new meaning through its intrinsic form which contains emotive elements participating in the derived meaning of the word as an expressive and evaluative component. The expressive and evaluative nature of zoomorphs provokes negative or positive social effect. Typical of certain speech situations are: the frequent occurrence of metaphoric personal names in everyday communication; in fiction, metaphoric meanings are elements of the evaluation of the characters or of the social phenomena that are being described. The semantic duality of metaphoric nominations makes them context-dependent in any syntactic position of the noun.