Loco ubi dicitur... “La toponomastica di Vallebona e dintorni” : Un territorio di confine tra Liguria e Provenza
Author
Summary, in English
As a special part of our cultural heritage, toponyms have been handed down orally from generation to generation for centuries or more at the place where they were coined, recalling events, activities and knowledge. Especially where written documentation is relatively young, place names offer a way to reach further back into the past. This is particularly true of many dialectal cultures, in which oral transmission has been the principal method of passing down knowledge. In this respect, toponyms are vital as they tell us something about the place to which they refer, its inhabitants and how they interacted with the land.
Before the “modern” era, assigning a name to a place not only had the function of identifying a location to facilitate orientation, but often included all sorts of information that could, one way or another, help whoever came across it. Thus, a toponym could point to its geographical character, specifying for example its feature category (mountains, passes, routes, lakes, rivers, forests, dwellings, farmland, hunting grounds, etc.), or point out possible dangers associated with the location (boundary markers, heights, precipices, streams etc.), or provide information on historical or religious facts (battles, skirmishes, festivities, etc.). Hence the study of place names entails not only gathering information on the history and language (and, implicitly, culture) of a place, but also understanding the unbroken interplay between humans and nature through different periods and under different conditions.
This study – conducted over the course of eight years – gathers, classifies and analyses the toponyms of Vallebona, a small village in western Liguria, and of its surroundings. The toponyms were collected through several sources, ranging from historical and current maps to municipal documents, census listings, interviews with Vallebona residents and government officials all the way to fieldwork. The total amounts to 744, a number significantly higher than the one recorded in cadastral surveys and on official maps. These findings point to the utility of research of this kind, especially in view of the rapid disappearance of toponymic systems in most of rural Italy.
The aim of the study is threefold: First to ascertain the geographical distributions of the collected toponyms and, above all, to establish their meaning, typology, internal structure, lexical status and functions. Great attention is paid to the etymologization of the collected data, which is conducted by comparing data from different areas. The interpretation of the 744 toponyms gathered in Vallebona stems from the consideration of various elements – including origin, semantic motivation, morphosyntactic structure, ubication, social historic context and lexical units. The integral analysis of Vallebona’s toponyms considers the linguistic processes as well as the extra linguistic ones, which resulted in the usage of designated toponyms that name and encompass village topology.
Second, to disclose the major structural patterns used in the creation of the toponyms. In this part, special attention is given to the suffixes employed, analysing their semantic value, their functions, their productivity and their role as an aid for the memorization of the toponyms.
Third, to establish similarities and differences between the dialects spoken in Vallebona and elsewhere in Liguria – particularly from a phonetic and lexical point of view. Our hope is that this will lead to a more precise definition of the dialects spoken in the area.
The information derived from the research was used to produce a map showing the geographic distribution of all the place names collected.
Before the “modern” era, assigning a name to a place not only had the function of identifying a location to facilitate orientation, but often included all sorts of information that could, one way or another, help whoever came across it. Thus, a toponym could point to its geographical character, specifying for example its feature category (mountains, passes, routes, lakes, rivers, forests, dwellings, farmland, hunting grounds, etc.), or point out possible dangers associated with the location (boundary markers, heights, precipices, streams etc.), or provide information on historical or religious facts (battles, skirmishes, festivities, etc.). Hence the study of place names entails not only gathering information on the history and language (and, implicitly, culture) of a place, but also understanding the unbroken interplay between humans and nature through different periods and under different conditions.
This study – conducted over the course of eight years – gathers, classifies and analyses the toponyms of Vallebona, a small village in western Liguria, and of its surroundings. The toponyms were collected through several sources, ranging from historical and current maps to municipal documents, census listings, interviews with Vallebona residents and government officials all the way to fieldwork. The total amounts to 744, a number significantly higher than the one recorded in cadastral surveys and on official maps. These findings point to the utility of research of this kind, especially in view of the rapid disappearance of toponymic systems in most of rural Italy.
The aim of the study is threefold: First to ascertain the geographical distributions of the collected toponyms and, above all, to establish their meaning, typology, internal structure, lexical status and functions. Great attention is paid to the etymologization of the collected data, which is conducted by comparing data from different areas. The interpretation of the 744 toponyms gathered in Vallebona stems from the consideration of various elements – including origin, semantic motivation, morphosyntactic structure, ubication, social historic context and lexical units. The integral analysis of Vallebona’s toponyms considers the linguistic processes as well as the extra linguistic ones, which resulted in the usage of designated toponyms that name and encompass village topology.
Second, to disclose the major structural patterns used in the creation of the toponyms. In this part, special attention is given to the suffixes employed, analysing their semantic value, their functions, their productivity and their role as an aid for the memorization of the toponyms.
Third, to establish similarities and differences between the dialects spoken in Vallebona and elsewhere in Liguria – particularly from a phonetic and lexical point of view. Our hope is that this will lead to a more precise definition of the dialects spoken in the area.
The information derived from the research was used to produce a map showing the geographic distribution of all the place names collected.
Department/s
Publishing year
2014
Language
Italian
Publication/Series
Études Romanes de Lund
Volume
91
Document type
Dissertation
Publisher
Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
Topic
- Languages and Literature
Keywords
- onomastics
- Italian
- dialectology
- Vallebona
- proper names
- Liguria
- place name
- toponymy
- microtoponyms
- cultural heritage
- etymology
- rural landscape
- ethnography
- language area
- toponymy recording
- place identity
- toponymization
- toponymic suffixes
- diachronic and synchronic perspective
- toponymic functions
- toponymic competence
- toponym constituent
- modern and historical sources
- historical-linguistic.
Status
Published
Supervisor
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0347-0822
- ISBN: 978-91-7473-999-2
Defence date
24 May 2014
Defence time
10:15
Defence place
Sal 207, Språk- och litteraturcentrum, Helgonabacken 12, Lund
Opponent
- Giorgio Marrapodi (Dr.)