The Onomastic landscape of Copenhagen: Meaning formation, Rewriting History and Onomastic Scale Reduction

This article provides an insight into urban toponyms in Copenhagen from a stylistic-rhetorical discourse analysis perspective. The findings originate from empirical collected names, which are further examined in my coming PhD thesis. I investigate all urban toponyms across onomastic categories within three study areas. The study areas are defined by rather different linguistic and rhetorical paradigms and consequently I am investigating each area from a slightly different theoretical and analytic approach. The City Centre study area is defined by many commercial names. Often the meanings of commercial names are complex because multimodal meaning construction strategies have been applied to the names. The multimodal meaning construction strategy delays the shift from appellative to proper name. In the development area (Carlsberg City District) I investigate the motives behind naming comparing the official chosen names to the actual in-use but unofficial names in the district. The residential area (Nørrebro) is, in my opinion, defined by different kinds of ‘places’. In the following I present my own term onomastic scale reduction as a tool for the naming authorities in Copenhagen to construct a sense of place in a vast and otherwise linguistically disorganized city.