Onomastisk skalareduktion: kunsten at skabe byer i byen alene ved sprog

This article presents one of three main results stemming from my PhD
thesis Urban Place Names – the linguistic dimension of the city (2016).
In my thesis I examined the onomastic landscapes of three study areas in
Copenhagen, Denmark. The term onomastic landscape refers to the proper
names in the linguistic landscape that can be found in cities, from
commercial names to street names.
In the onomastic and linguistic landscape it can sometimes be difficult,
or even impossible, to decide whether a sign is to be regarded, for
example, as a proper name or an appellative (Sandst 2016, pp. 93–155).
Furthermore, a sign may be perceived uniquely as a proper name in a
written-language context, but appear ambiguous in a spoken-language
situation. This offers opportunities for linguistic creativity in a broad
sense. In the visible onomastic landscape, what I call the positioning
discourse for proper names in the cityscape (Sandst 2016, pp. 101–112)
plays an important role in the process of distinguishing between
grammatical categories. Simply put, it is all about communication and
meaning-making in both the written and the spoken context, and
different rhetorical strategies can be applied to different name types
depending on whether a written or spoken situation is preferred.
In this article I focus on the category of street names. I present my
theory of onomastic scale reduction as a rhetorical strategy with the
potential to turn space into place by the use of group naming, i.e. the use
of a group of names with a common theme. This rhetorical strategy is not
necessarily dependent on the physical landscape, which makes the art of
group naming particularly potent. Furthermore, the theme of the
group-named area must be transparent and easily remembered, and must
break with the onomastic norm in the immediate vicinity. All the
examples given are empirical and are drawn from my thesis.