Cultural Connotations And Linguistic Features Of Shanghai Street Names

Toponymy is the scientific study,of place-names based on etymological, historical,and geographical information.It is also a science dealing with the study of place names based fundamentally on linguistic clues.As part of place names,a street name is an identifying name given to a street which represents a single specific place.According to the theory of semiotics, language is a special sign system.Street names,as language signs,have an intimate relationship with social and cultural context.The street name is a kind of social phenomena,the product of human interactions,productions and struggles.The research on street names is closely related to geography,history,sociology and linguistics and can provide valuable information and materials to these fields. Although it is known that some street names bear typical local features and rich cultural connotations,the street names have rarely been studied.This thesis attempts to probe into the culture reflected in Shanghai street names, and analyze the linguistic features of the street names from the synchronic and diachronic perspectives,based on the materials collected mainly from a relatively authoritative book Shanghaishi Luming Daquan(《上海市路名大全》,written by Shi Songjiu)which was published in 1989 and in which 1816 urban street names are recorded.Culture and language are interdependent on each other.On the one hand, language is restricted and influenced by culture all its way from creation to development.On the other hand,language can be viewed as a carder of culture, revealing an enormous amount of cultural information.By analyzing the evolution of Shanghai street names in four periods from the diachronic perspective:street naming during the settlement period,street naming after the withdrawal of settlements in 1943,after Sino-Japanese War and street naming after liberation,a conclusion can be drawn that street naming is a social activity which is restricted and affected by social and cultural elements of the place.And politics exerts a strong influence on street names.Conversely,the street names are "living fossils",recording the historical events,revealing the geographical features of Shanghai,mirroring the population migration and reflecting people's religious beliefs.Street names have dual systems of sounds and meanings.As linguistic symbols which are designed for the purpose of human communication,street names can be studied from the perspective of morphology,phonetics and semantics.By the statistical analysis and comparison of the morphological features and syllables of street names from the synchronic perspective,and by analyzing the semantic features of some street names,the street naming trends and naming patterns can be concluded.Being the initial relatively systemic and comprehensive research of Shanghai street names from the cultural and linguistic perspectives,the study will be of a great help in understanding Shanghai history and culture,and will yield some useful information for other social academic fields as well.