The QPR^+S Naming Model Of Place Names From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistic

Place name is a kind of language symbol that human beings denominate a specific geographical entity with written records,possessing sociality and construal.Of its result comes into being out of psychological cognitive processing carried out by specific individuals or collectives’ interaction with physical world under the influence of external social factors,and in turn its variation also mirrors the social movement.Formerly toponymy research we founded principally centralized on etymology tracing and cultural origin,which was lucid classification and general overview.From a holistic perspective,it is scattered without viably systematic analysis.When cognitive linguistics in 21 st century prioritizes cognitive embodiment and cultural peculiarity,researchers orient to explore formation mechanism of place name.However,present researches neglect the dynamic concept processing and drive off influential social factors for lexicon variation,so analysis partially is one-sided.Cognitive sociolinguistics fitly integrates social factors with cognition to analyze language so that formation of place name and its embodied social culture would be thoroughly comprehended.Besides,since some place names in Britain have been partly abolished or severely damaged nowadays,relevant monographs or documents were outdated already.In order to fix these vacancies,this thesis,from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics,would take metonymy as the basic theory combining social factors with qualia structure,salience and cognitive reference point to convincingly construe the mechanism of place name and underlying historical culture.This thesis tends to adopt qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze place names of county and region in England.Firstly,for accuracy and timeliness of the research,all data is retrieved from Google Map and Wikipedia where a total of 334 existing place names are collected.Secondly,with the help of authoritative British dictionary of place name,relevant literature,online English etymology dictionary and Wikipedia search engine,etymologies are assorted in kinds.In the end,with the new-born framework model,this thesis intends to provide a preliminary analysis of the cognitive mechanism of place names of England,reflecting social and cultural phenomenon behind.This study found that metonymy operates naming mechanism of place names in the way that a salience replaces the whole space.Based on the principle of salience,a cognitive reference point during the operation would activate the psychological channel where at the onset conceptual representation of subjects’ background knowledge as prerequisite is required.The place name finally is formed by mutual operation of internal construal and external social factors.After elaborated analysis,14 naming types in total are assorted out and salient objects presented include waters,topographic feature,animal and plant in nature alike,also colonization elements about tribal name and person’s name.Besides,not only cognitive methods would influence the naming mechanism of place names,but simultaneously so does the constraint of external society on lexicon variation.The thesis discovered that affixes sticking on names dexterously reflect external influences.In terms of affix occurrences,central England after the 11 th century is more susceptible to external factors such as the change of administrative division and environment,so lexicon of place name varied a lot.While coastal areas did be more decorated with affixes in the meaning of frontier defense and military domain,for these places are vulnerably intruded but were remained intact with colonial culture.These are profoundly related to the historical development and colonial culture of England.