Exploring linguistic and cognitive-communicative aspects of vernacular toponyms: a comparative study of English and Kazakh languages
Davletova S. Bizhkenova A.
1 December 2025De Gruyter Mouton
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
2025#21Issue 2297 - 321 pp.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the vernacular toponymy of Kazakhstan and the United Kingdom through analysis of their linguistic (phonetic, word-formation, lexical-semantic) and cognitive-communicative features. By considering the features of vernacular content, phonetic, word-formation, lexical, cognitive, and communicative resources in the Kazakh and English languages are compared. It was determined that the toponyms of Great Britain retained the phonetic nature of the English language and loanwords from French and other languages are rarely used. The examination of word-formation resources shows that in the toponyms of Great Britain, the word-formation elements of the English language were most often used; in the Kazakh toponyms, both Kazakh and Russian wordformation resources were used. In lexical-semantic terms, both Kazakh and English languages had approximately the same indicators. Lexical and semantic groups, such as lexemes associated with spatial relations, the association of people on national, social, and gender grounds, historical names, and people’s employment, are identified. Nominations pertaining to sarcastic and metaphorical linkages were also observed from a communicative and cognitive perspective. The statistics were given in tables. This study can be used to compare toponyms in different structural languages and examine the lexical-semantic, linguistic, and cultural nature of toponyms.
historical memory , informal names , lexical-semantic groups , loanwords , word-formation elements
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Department of Foreign Philology, L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, 2 Satpayev Str., Astana, 010008, Kazakhstan
Department of Foreign Philology
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