Zusammenfassung: The present article sets out to investigate the pragmatically marked manipulation of personal names ‘Angela Merkel’ and ‘Donald Trump’ in mass media texts. Section 1 gives a brief outline of the findings from the linguistic onomastic research that are relevant fot the current study. In sections 2 and 3, different types, mechanisms and pragmatic functions of name manipulation are empirically investigated on the basis of the data from the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and an addition data sample collected by the author. The results of this study are summarized in section 4. They are discussed here from the perspective of their theoretical importance for such research directions as onomastic text linguistics and pragmatics that are yet to be established.

Abstract: The present article sets out to investigate the pragmatically marked manipulation of personal names ‘Angela Merkel’ and ‘Donald Trump’ in mass media texts. Section 1 gives a brief outline of the findings from the linguistic onomastic research that are relevant fot the current study. In sections 2 and 3, different types, mechanisms and pragmatic functions of name manipulation are empirically investigated on the basis of the data from the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and an addition data sample collected by the author. The results of this study are summarized in section 4. They are discussed here from the perspective of their theoretical importance for such research directions as onomastic text linguistics and pragmatics that are yet to be established.