Bohemian Manchester, Moravian Klondike and Silesian Versailles: Attributive structures of foreign place names in contemporary Czech journalism

• Authors: Jaroslav David , Michal Semian
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Exonyms – i.e. toponyms of the type Rakousko, Benátky (‘Austria’, ‘Venice’) – were introduced to the Czech landscape (along with foreign endonyms) in medieval times. During the 19th century, a new, specific application of foreign place names began to appear, and this development forms the focus of the present article. Such words began to feature in attributive structures of the type český, pražský (‘Czech’ or ‘Bohemian’, ‘Prague’s’) + exonym / foreign endonym; many of these structures came into widespread use referring to areas whose boundaries were not clearly delineated or defined, or they served the purposes of marketing and advertising. In the 1990s, the growing influence of a “new” European regionalism and the formation of new territorial entities was accompanied by a revival of some old regional identities – and, in turn, by the revival of their names. Attributive structures with foreign place names thus began to re-appear in toponymy, and also in advertising or journalism. The analysis presented in this article is based on the SYN PUB component of the Czech National Corpus, and it focuses on the collocations of the lemmas český/moravský/slezský (‘Czech’ or ‘Bohemian’/‘Moravian’/‘Silesian’) + exonym / foreign endonym, aiming to offer insight into the reasons underlying the use of such structures in contemporary journalism.

Keywords

EN

place names; exonyms; foreign endonyms; journalism; place marketing; Czech National Corpus; appellativization

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of the Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 76
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 129-148

Contributors

author

Jaroslav David

• Katedra českého jazyka FF OU, Reální 5, Ostrava, 701 03, Czech Republic

author

Michal Semian

• KSGRR PřF UK, Albertov 6, Praha 2, 128 43, Czech Republic