Names for urban places and conceptual taxonomies: the view from Italian

Ursini, Francesco‐Alessio; Samo, Giuseppe

doi:10.1080/13875868.2021.1954186

Cited by 5 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…First, our choice in using OSM for a dialectological and geolinguistic study seems justified on two grounds: we have been able to extract a sample size superior to previous studies (e.g. Ursini & Samo, 2022b); and the VGI philosophy underpinning this platform guarantees the local, grassroots origins of the data (see Sui and Goodchild, 2011). Our findings are thus methodologically consistent with previous work in Italian toponomastics (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…In the first part, we extracted a total of 452,538 tokens distributed unevenly across regions. We thus obtained a far more voluminous sample than the one in (Ursini and Samo, 2022b), which extracted 213,218 tokens. In so doing, we increased possibilities to discover local/dialectal terms.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, speakers could potentially infer their dialectal origins via an indirect process of 'geo-localization'. That is, they can associate rare or lesser known generic terms as descriptors for places only found in certain cities or regions (see Cassi, 2015;Rezsegi, 2020b;Tent and Blair, 2019;Ursini and Samo, 2022b). Our goal with the questionnaire was thus to test whether speakers of any regional origin could at least have intuitions about the dialectal roots of these terms, and whether these roots would affect their comprehension and answering of the questionnaire.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is for these reasons that we opted to use this gazetteer: ultimately, OSM could offer us easily accessible data 'closer' to local knowledge. It also offered us possibly the highest number of tokens and types on Italian urbanonyms (see Ursini and Samo, 2022b for a comparison).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Etymological (e.g. Cassi, 2015;Granucci, 1988Granucci, , 2004 and lexicographic studies (Ursini and Samo, 2022b) have hinted at the dialectal origins of some generic terms in this class of toponyms. However, these studies do not assess in what form the distribution of dialectal generic terms is linked to the Italian territory, its distinctive parts (e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Geographical maps meet place names where languages meet dialects: The case of Italian

Samo,

Ursini

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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The goal of this article is to analyse the role of urban place names (‘urbanonyms’) with dialectal origins in the domain of Italian toponomastics. The article offers a gazetteer-based study from which a list of dialectal generic terms is extracted and compiled. From this list, a detailed geographic distributional analysis of these terms is offered, and the dialectal origins of terms are assessed. A questionnaire study is subsequently presented that analyses to what degree Italian speakers may interpret these terms as being dialectal in origin, and to an extent unique to the places they classify. The article concludes by discussing how these findings can inform our understanding of place names, their linguistic properties and their possible dialectal origins.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Geographical maps meet place names where languages meet dialects: The case of Italian

Samo,

Ursini

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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Italian places in Japanese manga: a study on topophilia in graphic narratives

Ursini,

Samo

2024

Journal of Literary Semantics

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The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis on how Italian places act as key narrative units in Japanese manga. Building on a quantitative and qualitative corpus study, the paper investigates how culturally salient locations are embedded in these narratives. It is first shown that authors develop salient locations (“places”) as distinct entities playing key roles within narrative structures. It is then shown that these representations of places follow principles of cultural relevance, popularity, historical and geographical faithfulness. This is the case because authors creating manga set in Italy share knowledge and appreciation of Italian places and their cultural import with readers. These results are framed in a theory of geo-criticism and in a possible worlds analysis of places in fiction, hereby extended to graphic narratives.

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The interpretation of urbanonyms in discourse: Reconciling theoretical accounts with experimental results

Ursini

Samo

2022

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

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The goal of this paper is to offer an account of the discourse properties of urbanonynms in Italian (e.g. Via Roma, Piazza di Spagna). The paper introduces urbanonyms as a sub-type of toponyms (place names) whose linguistic properties have received little attention so far. The paper proposes an experimental study that shows how urbanonyms can enter in anaphoric relations mediated via urbanonyms’ lexico-grammatical properties. Via these experimental results, it is shown that urbanonyms can act as antecedents of indexical pronouns (e.g. qui ‘here’), and complex noun phrases (e.g. questa via ‘this street’). It is also shown that urbanonyms can involve co-referring patterns in sentences including verba nominandi (chiamarsi ‘to be called’). These results are discussed against the theoretical proposals investigating toponyms and other proper names. It is suggested that the two main “rival” theories on names, the description theory and the causal reference theory, can only address the novel data if combined into a new theoretical synthesis.

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Names for urban places and conceptual taxonomies: the view from Italian

Cited by 5 publications

References 29 publications

Geographical maps meet place names where languages meet dialects: The case of Italian

Geographical maps meet place names where languages meet dialects: The case of Italian

Italian places in Japanese manga: a study on topophilia in graphic narratives

The interpretation of urbanonyms in discourse: Reconciling theoretical accounts with experimental results

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