Onomastic Analysis of the Pseudonyms of Parisian Prostitutes from the 18th to the Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the research context of onomastics, more specifically to studies on anthroponymy, or even pseudonymy, and focuses on the current need for onomastic analyses in Romance Studies. Indeed, the use of pseudonyms has received comparatively little linguistic investigation. We have submitted to our analysis a corpus of pseudonyms of prostitutes practising their profession in Paris. This corpus includes 357 pseudonyms and covers a period between the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The data was collected from police reports (archival work) as well as from sociological studies dealing with prostitution in Paris in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to morphosyntactic as well as semantic criteria, we will attempt to apply a taxonomy developed previously to the pseudonyms of prostitutes distinguishing several types of procedures for the formation of pseudonyms of German criminals in the 19th century.