The semantics of romance geonyms: cross-linguistic variation meets context sensitivity

The goal of this paper is to offer a model of the semantics of geonyms occurring in toponyms from Romance languages (e.g. Italian geonym piazza ’square’ in toponym Piazza Grande ’Main Square’). The paper defines this model along the two dimensions of cross-linguistic and context-sensitive variation. Cross-linguistically, the paper focuses on five Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. For each language, data are collected involving toponyms and geonyms expressing the place concepts ’square’, ’street’ and ’alley’ across different contexts of use. Building on these data, three key results are presented. First, it is shown that individuals use these geonyms to express wide arrays of contingent features that they ascribe to these concepts in general contexts (e.g. in conversations). However, uses become restricted to culturally, temporally (more) stable features forming place concepts in technical contexts (e.g. Wikipedia articles, Wikidata dictionary definitions). Second, it is shown that even if uses vary considerably, shared semantic features define language-specific prototypical senses that these place concepts express. Third, it is shown that cross-linguistic semantic similarity becomes quantifiable. For instance, French place has similar context-free uses to Italian piazza and Spanish plaza, since language-specific prototypical senses for these place concepts share most of their constituting semantic features. The paper concludes by discussing consequences for theories of toponyms’ semantic properties across different disciplines.