Cognitive space of characters through the prism of their names (on the material of German literature)

The article deals with a new approach to the characters' cognitive space analysis, based upon their proper names given in the literary texts. This approach reveals the ways of interaction of cognitive space of the reader and that of the author by means of analyzing characters' cognitive space. The article focuses upon one of possible mechanisms to build up a functional value of the character type where their names are of main significance which contributes a lot to decoding the motif of the text. The motif of the text is chiefly realized by proper names whose role can hardly be overestimated, at the same time it contributes a lot to understanding the main idea of the literary text.