Cognitive Maps and Toponyms in a Broadening Geographical Horizon

Reszegi, Katalin (2020) Cognitive Maps and Toponyms in a Broadening Geographical Horizon. In: Name and Naming. Multiculturalism in Onomastics. Proceedings of the Fifth „Name and Naming” International Conference on Onomastics. Editura Mega – Editura Argonaut, Clus-Napoca. (In Press)

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Abstract

In today’s modern societies human horizons have expanded significantly due to improving transportation opportunities, education, and the media. Therefore, we now have direct and indirect knowledge even about other continents and far-away regions. At the same time, however, due to the changing lifestyles resulting from the wide-ranging use of technological devices, the majority of people have moved further away from nature and the surrounding geographical landscape. Daily life is connected to residential areas, most people have little knowledge of the outskirts of settlements, and on our cognitive maps the border is mostly incomplete and full of white spots; in relation to this, the onomastic corpus we are aware of has a different composition in terms of the proportion of various toponyms compared to one or two hundred years ago. In my paper, I discuss how changes in lifestyle and globalization affected the organization of the cognitive map and as part of it, people’s knowledge of place name.

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