Nominations of Germans in Slovak novels about World War II

This paper proposes a classification of nominations for Germans in Slovak novels about World War II based on the category of otherness. These nominations may be neutral, but there are far more nominations with negative connotations, i.e., pejoratives or pejorative nominatives. The use of pejoratives leads us to the concept of "pejorative alienation". By negatively evaluating an object, the speaker excludes it from their world. Pejoratives are linked to deep-seated folkloric archetypes, which is a distinctive feature of the universe of Slovak war novels. The result of the study is the development of a system of nominations for Germans based on the degree of value (de)gradation: 1) more or less neutral designations; 2) ethnonyms directly derived from the lexeme Nemec; 3) nominations referring to the intellectual abilities of the enemy; 4) designations revealing the moral qualities of Germans; 5) zoonyms based on comparisons of Germans to animals; this category also includes pejoratives based on metaphors and metonymies; 6) the ultimate degree of degradation is manifested in nominations when Germans are associated with evil forces. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the study reveals the connection between linguistic mechanisms of dehumanization and folkloric archetypes deeply rooted in the Slovak cultural consciousness, which has not previously received systematic analysis in a linguo-cultural aspect.