Model of traditional attribution: the Catholic calendar in the Christening Certificates of the Cathedral of Tlalnepantla de Baz, State of Mexico in 1960

Abstract

In the year 1960, a decade of changes in the anthroponymic usages began as a reflection of the social transformations that would start to occur from that moment on in Mexico and around the world. This paper aims at evaluating just to what extent the traditional attribution model by choosing from the Catholic calendar is still the dominant one during that period of time. A sample of baptism certificates gathered from the Cathedral of Tlalnepantla de Baz, a municipality adjacent to Mexico City, is analyzed. This is the first phase of a broader project on socioanthroponymy in which intergenerational transmission of names, the influence of fashion as a social phenomenon and various lexicological elements will also be considered. The theoretical basis on which the project is built comes from the European works in onomastics (especially from the French school: Van Langendonck, 2007; Fabre, 1987; Vaxelaire, 2008), pragmasemantics  (Kleiber, 1995; Jonasson, 1994; Gary-Prieur, 1994; Hébert, 2004) and socioanthroponymy (Aldrin, 2011; Bramwell, 2011; Gerritzen, 2006). As part of a later stage, the results from this project will be compared with those previously obtained from analyzing birth certificates of that same year Significant differences are not expected at this point.

Key words: Socioanthroponymy; given name; nominal attribution models; Mexico; XX century.