London’s Linguistic Landscape in Works by British Modernist Writers: Toponyms and Ergonyms

Toponyms and ergonyms have been attracting considerable scholarly interest due to their noticeable role as structural elements of city text, nodes of cognitive maps, and their frequent occurrence as precedent or frequently recurrent units. A number of linguists have investigated various aspects of these onomastic units (e.g. Emelyanova 2007; Superanskaya 2014; Urasmetova 2017). However, the toponymic and ergonymic components of London’s linguistic landscape have, in effect, received insufficient scholarly attention. The aim of this research paper is to classify ergonyms and toponyms as exemplified by a corpus of texts by British modernist writers into lexical semantic groups and to assess their significance within London’s linguistic landscape. Onomastic units were collected from texts with the help of the corpus manager AntConc and the language of regular expressions inbuilt into this computer programme. Lexical-semantic analysis according to semanticist Vladimir Gak will be employed in order to determine the classification. The paper expects to find and classify the components of toponymic and ergonymic systems, and to describe the meaningful collocations with them. The cultural value of these onomastic units will be identified within the confines of London's linguistic landscape. Thus, these results may exert a significant influence on determining the role and functions of toponyms and ergonyms in the context of a new stage in the development of onomastics.