Toponymy, drawing, and representing place: a comment on James Cantrill’s “On Seeing ‘Places’”

ABSTRACT

Cantrill’s [(2015). On seeing “places” for what they are, and not what we want them to be. Environmental Communication. doi:10.1080/17524032.2015.1048268] commentary on representing place, actors and informants summarises a large body of place research relevant to environmental communication. This comment offers an addendum to Cantrill’s description of representational validity - the degree to which investigative conclusions accord with the perceptions held by the respondents who originally generate data on which the analyses are based. It reconsiders the tools available to scholars researching place to assess how several of Cantrill’s methodological and theoretical suggestions may have already been realised in various linguistic and ethnographic approaches developed in the field of linguistic ecology.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecolinguistics
• linguistic ecology
• place
• place names
• toponymic theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.