Abstract
Are the contents of toponyms meaningless, as it is often claimed in linguistic literature, or can the generic parts in toponyms, such as hill in Black Hill, be used to infer landscape descriptions? We investigate this question by, firstly, linking gazetteer data with topographic characteristics, and, secondly, by conducting analysis of how the use of landscape terms might have changed over time in a historic corpus. We thus aim at answering a linguistic, and ethnophysiographic, research question through digital input data and processing. Our study area is Switzerland and our main focus is on geographic eminences, and in particular on the use of the terms Spitze, Horn and Berg. We show that most prominent generic parts in toponyms show expected topographic characteristics. However, not all generic parts strictly follow this rule, as in the case of Berg. Some generic parts have lost their meaning in standard language over time (e.g. Horn). We therefore put a cautionary note on the use of generic parts in toponyms in landscape studies, but point out that the subtle details of these differences provide rich topics for future research.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bayardo, R.J., Yiming, M.A., Srikant, R.R.: Scaling up all pairs similarity search. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. S. 131–S. 140 (2007)
Brunk, K.: Kartographische Arbeiten und deutsche Namengebung in Neuschwanden, Antarktis. Geschichte und Entwicklung der Geodäsie 24(1) (1986)
Burenhult, N. (ed.): Language and Landscape: Geographical Ontology in Cross-linguistic Perspective. Language Sciences, vol. 30(2/3). Elsevier, Amsterdam (2008)
Burenhult, N., Levinson, S.C.: Language and landscape: a cross-linguistic perspective. Language Sciences 30(2/3), 135–150 (2008)
Coates, R.A.: Properhood. Language 82(2), 356–382 (2006)
Coaz, J.: Ueber Ortsbenennung in den Schweizeralpen. In: Jahrbuch des S.A.C von 1865, pp. 461–478. S.A.C Verlag, Bern (1865)
Derungs, C., Purves, R.S.: Empirical experiments on the nature of Swiss mountains. In: Proceedings of GISRUK 2007, Maynooth, Ireland, pp. 348–352 (2007)
Derungs, C., Purves, R.S.: From text to landscape: Locating, identifying and mapping the use of landscape features in a Swiss Alpine corpus. International Journal of Geographic Information Science (2013)
Egenhofer, M.J., Mark, D.M.: Naive geography. In: Frank, A.U., Kuhn, W. (eds.) Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, pp. 1–15. Springer, Berlin (1995)
Fellenberg, E.: Das Aletschhorn. In: Jahrbuch des S.A.C von 1864, pp. 183–210. S.A.C Verlag, Bern (1864)
Feng, C., Mark, D.M.: Exploring NGA GEOnet Names Server Data for Cross-Linguistic Research on Landscape Categories: A Case Study of Some Toponyms in Malaysia and Indonesia. In: GIScience 2012, Columbus, Ohio, September 19-21 (2012) (extended abstracts)
Fisher, P., Wood, J., Cheng, T.: Where is Helvellyn? Fuzziness of multi-scale landscape morphology. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29(1), 106–128 (2004)
Goodchild, M.F.: Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal 69(4), 211–221 (2007)
Grice, P.: Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J. (eds.) Syntax and Semantics. 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41–58. Academic Press, New York (1975)
Hollenstein, L., Purves, R.S.: Exploring place through user-generated content: Using Flickr tags to describe city cores. Journal of Spatial Information Science 1, 21–48 (2010)
Hollis, J., Valentine, T.: Proper-Name Processing: Are Proper Names Pure Referencing Expressions? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27(1), 99–116 (2001)
Jones, C.B., Purves, R.S.: Geographical information retrieval. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22(3), 219–228 (2008)
Kohonen, T.: Self-Organizing Maps. Springer, Berlin (1995)
Levinson, S.C.: Foreword. In: Mark, D.M., Turk, A.G., Burenhult, N., Stea, D. (eds.) Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, pp. ix–x. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2011)
Lindt, R.: Das Finsteraarhorn. In: Jahrbuch des S.A.C von 1864, pp. 273–312. S.A.C Verlag, Bern (1864)
Mark, D.M., Skupin, A., Smith, B.: Features, Objects, and Other Things: Ontological Distinctions in the Geographic Domain. In: Montello, D.R. (ed.) COSIT 2001. LNCS, vol. 2205, pp. 489–502. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Mark, D.M., Turk, A.G.: Landscape categories in yindjibarndi: Ontology, environment, and language. In: Kuhn, W., Worboys, M.F., Timpf, S. (eds.) COSIT 2003. LNCS, vol. 2825, pp. 28–45. Springer, Heidelberg (2003a)
Mark, D.M., Turk, A.G.: Ethnophysiography. Paper presented at: Workshop on Spatial and Geographic Ontologies (Prior to COSIT 2003), September 23 (2003b) (published on web site)
Mark, D.M., Turk, A.G., Burenhult, N., Stea, D. (eds.): Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2011)
Pike, R.J., Evans, I., Hengl, T.: Geomorphometry: A Brief Guide. In: Hengl, T., Hannes, I. (eds.) Geomorphometry - Concepts, Software, Applications. Series Developments in Soil Science, vol. 33, pp. 3–33 (2008)
Scheider, S., Janowicz, K., Kuhn, W.: Grounding Geographic Categories in the Meaningful Environment. In: Hornsby, K.S., Claramunt, C., Denis, M., Ligozat, G. (eds.) COSIT 2009. LNCS, vol. 5756, pp. 69–87. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Sennrich, R., Schneider, G., Volk, M., Warin, M.: A New Hybrid Dependency Parser for German. In: Chiarcos, C., de Castilho, R.E., Stede, M. (eds.) Proceedings of Biennial GSCL Conference 2009, pp. 115–124 (2009)
Skupin, A., Esperbé, A.: An Alternative Map of the United States Based on an n-Dimensional Model of Geographic Space. Journal of Visual Computing 22(4), 290–304 (2011)
Studer, G.: Das Mattwaldhorn. In: Jahrbuch des S.A.C von 1864, pp. 226–232. S.A.C Verlag, Bern (1864)
USGS, Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) (2013), http://geonames.usgs.gov (accessed January 31, 2013)
Valentine, T., Brennen, T., Brédart, S.: The Cognitive Psychology of Proper Names: On the Importance of Being Ernest. Routledge, London (1996)
Volk, M., Bubenhofer, N., Althaus, A., Bangerter, M.: Classifying Named Entities in an Alpine Heritage Corpus. Künstliche Intelligenz 4, 40–43 (2009)
Wehrens, R., Buydens, L.M.C.: Self- and Super-organising Maps in R: the kohonen package. Statistical Software 30(6), 1–19 (2007)
Weilenmann, J.J.: Der Piz Roseg. In: Jahrbuch des S.A.C von 1865, pp. 86–128. S.A.C Verlag, Bern (1865)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Derungs, C., Wartmann, F., Purves, R.S., Mark, D.M. (2013). The Meanings of the Generic Parts of Toponyms: Use and Limitations of Gazetteers in Studies of Landscape Terms. In: Tenbrink, T., Stell, J., Galton, A., Wood, Z. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01789-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01790-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)