The article analyses Russian affectonyms (affectionate vocatives) as an important part of emotive vocabulary, speech etiquette, and linguistic worldview. Affectonyms are a unique phenomenon of the language system. Despite their high level of intimacy, they indicate not only a tight circle of close people (lovers, married couples, parents and children), but also everyday communication between acquaintances and, occasionally, strangers. The main pragmatic goal of affectionate vocatives is to form the favorable climate of trust and mutual understanding. The analysis of affectonyms as universal and ideo-ethnic entities is based on the concepts of modem East European linguists. There are some basic universal characteristics of affectonyms: (1) they have a high degree of expressiveness sometimes revealed only in the diachronic aspect; (2) from a historical perspective, they are a product of melioration of lexical meaning; (3) they demonstrate the emotiogenity as the ability to evoke an emotional state in a recipient; (4) the range of their pragmatic meanings is extremely wide; (5) they implement phatic and appellate functions of language. The analysis of the data of the Russian National Corpus allows to drawing a number of conclusions about additional semantic and pragmatic meanings of affectonyms, including the following: affection, familiarity, condescension, irony, reproach, soft and extreme aggression. The detailed comparative analysis of the Dictionary of Russian Speech Etiquette by A.G. Balakay and the data of the Russian National Corpus reveals some unique features of Russian affectonyms: (1) they have rich word derivation, especially due to diminutive forms; (2) they are closely related to the traditional linguistic picture of the world, which is sometimes quite obscure for native speakers; (3) they always reflect the rules of etiquette of a particular time; (4) they have gender specification, represented by gender neutral/specific and gender fluid (diachronically) names; (5) they are actively used for creating ironic senses. The findings suggest that this research could also be useful for a future study into a new linguistic direction (Peace Linguistics), which is part of the interdisciplinary Peace Studies.
