Names for urban places and conceptual taxonomies: the view from Italian

ABSTRACT

The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of urbanonyms, names for urban places, and show how this analysis can inform a conceptual taxonomy of urban places via the cultural lens of language. To reach this goal, the paper offers a classification of Italian urbanonyms (e.g., Via Nazionale “National Street”) based on data extraction from the Pagine Gialle directory, and a taxonomy of place concepts. This classification is obtained via a lexicographic analysis of extracted terms and their sense relations. A discussion of place concepts unique to cities across Italy is offered, as proof of the importance of cultural and linguistic facets. The paper concludes by discussing how these results can inform research on place ontologies across disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Place names
• urbanonyms
• conceptualization
• taxonomy
• Italian

Acknowledgments

None at this stage;

Declaration of interest

No conflicts of interest have arisen at this stage.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ Technically, Neapolitan and Venetian are distinct Italic (Romance) languages co-existing with Italian as the national language (Berruto, 2012). We leave this difference aside as it does not play a role in our discussion.

² The Pagine Gialle gazetteer also includes a business directory, which we have ignored because it only included advertising businesses (e.g., restaurants). Since businesses as places are too small to appear on the maps used in this study, we only leave aside information on these “undetectable” places.

³ The taxonomy contains generic terms represented as nodes in the graph, whereas the Supplementary file contains an Appendix with the list of terms with their (approximate) English translations. Hence, the taxonomy represents relations between the senses of generic terms as relations between the terms themselves (e.g., via and vico). Since most definitions for terms tend to be considerably long, we adopt this method for reasons of space. We then use edges (lines) to represent hyponymy (i.e., type-of relations), with (relative) hyponyms being on the right side of each edge.:

⁴ We are aware that in systems in which a stronger emphasis is placed on the naming of gathering places (e.g., Asian address systems), one would find a different distribution of names in gazetteers. We believe that analyzing such cross-cultural differences would be theoretically insightful, but we must leave such an endeavor for future research.

⁵ A detailed distributional analysis of terms could be offered, e.g., by pin-pointing the distribution of terms across provinces. We leave this task for future endeavors, however.

⁶ We also observe that the possibility of operating at finer-grained granularity levels would probably allow us to offer more refined taxonomies. For instance, the Pagine Gialle gazetteer does not report the names of connecting places related to transport lines (e.g., subway lines), which may however emerge if one analyzes higher-resolution gazetteers (e.g., 1:5000 maps).