This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The work is devoted to the analysis of the image of Homo agens (acting human), reflected in the names of settlements (oikonyms) of Volgograd Region. The study is conducted on the material of the oikonymic dictionary of the Volgograd Region, which is currently being prepared for publication by the authors of this work. The use of the lexicographic method in combination with etymological analysis makes it possible to systematize the materials of the oikonymic dictionary in accordance with the purpose of the study – to identify the main toponymic models that reflect the various aspects of human activity within the territory occupied by the modern Volgograd Region. The analysis allows us to distinguish two groups of names that give an idea of a person-actor in the territory under consideration: 1) personological oikonyms that characterize a person as a subject of a certain type of activity, axiologically significant for a particular region (represent a per-son in terms of his profession/type of activity, relations to military service, to religion, as well as his social status); 2) functional-attributive oikonyms that give a utilitarian description of an object – a specific settlement – from the point of view of human activity (indicate the adaptability of a topoobject to the life of a farmer, cattle breeder, fisherman, etc.). Prospects are outlined for the study of the images of Homo vigilantes/vigilabus – a human observer, Homo ludens – a human playing and others that can complement the presented characterization of a subject who develops the space of a particular region and arranges his life on it.
The review presents an analysis of Roman Razumov’s monograph which is a comprehensive study of Russian urbanonymy in its synchronic and diachronic aspects. The first chapter of the monograph provides a critical overview of Russian studies on urbanonymy and specifies the onomastic terminology related to the theoretical foundations of this research. In the second chapter, the field approach is applied to a selection of urban names of different types. The structure suggested by the author includes the units of the core (names of streets, squares, and urban districts), near-core (names of buildings and churches), and periphery (names of bridges, parks and green spaces, monuments, fountains). The third chapter describes Russian urbanonymy in synchronic aspect: the author defines the naming patterns typical to Russian urbanonymic system (descriptive, memorial, symbolic, and eusemantic (suggesting positive connotations), and proceeds with comparing their implementation in capital cities, big and small provincial towns, monolingual and polylingual cities. The fourth chapter presents Russian urbanonymy in diachrony. Here, the author explores the tendencies in urban naming in different periods of Russian history: including the naming processes in modern Russian urbanonymy of late 20th — early 21st c. The reviewer’s remarks concern the debatable issues of the use of some terms in the monograph and the typology of the naming patterns. The reviewer also notes a huge impact of this work in generalizing and systematizing such extensive material (urbanonyms of 60 large and small cities of Russia, from the 18th c. to the present), the development of comprehensive methods of analysis of intracity names, both in spatial and temporal aspects, in drawing attention to the problems of urbanonymic terminology and the identification of systemic relationships in urbanonymy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.