Toponyms reflecting ecclesiastical possession in the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary = [Egyházi birtoklást tükröző helynevek a középkori Magyar Királyságban]

Bölcskei, Andrea (2015) Toponyms reflecting ecclesiastical possession in the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary = [Egyházi birtoklást tükröző helynevek a középkori Magyar Királyságban]. Onoma, Journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, 49. ISSN 0078-463X, eISSN 1783 -1644 (In Press)

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Abstract

This paper intends to examine the cultural and linguistic history of place names stressing the role of the medieval Church as a feudal landowner, i.e. toponyms referring to (i) the possession of a clergyman, and (ii) that of a religious order will be surveyed. The author first gives an overview of the political, economic and cultural changes that took place between 896 and 1301 in the territory of Hungary, paying special attention to the Hungarian peculiarities of church organization and their consequences to land ownership. Linguistic features discussed in the paper involve: (i) semantic references to ecclesiastical possessors in the name forms; (ii) the appearance and spread of the name type in time and space; (iii) structural features (including the stock and frequency of the relevant lexemes and toponym-forming suffixes in the names, the syntactic and semantic structures of the single- and two-constituent names) as well as (iv) possible patterns of evolution, sound, structural and semantic changes affecting the name forms in the period. The author uses the principles of Cognitive Linguistics to explore how names in this case were designed to manifest linguistically the contemporary reality from the Church’s perspective and were utilized to direct speakers’ attention to a given Church-related aspect of the place being named. The mechanism of using place names to display, even if indirectly, the importance of religion in medieval life and how it influenced people’s convictions and beliefs is also explored in the paper.

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