Presentation at the XXIInd International Congress for Onomastic Sciences, Pisa, 26th August 2005
Structural analysis of Finnish toponyms has been well established for the past three decades. Nevertheless, progress during the latter half of that period in cognitive linguistics offers the necessary theoretical background for a new view at toponymic structure. In addition, the emergence of computerised corpora and quantitative methods for analysing such corpora provide the methodological tools for such a new look.
This article is a concise study of Finnish hydronyms as analysed in the framework of Construction Grammar. The analysis covers a variety of onomastic questions, such as naming patterns, the importance of analogy, and inductive naming. It also reveals some features that require some refining of the theoretical base: in particular, phenomena like contrastive naming would seem to imply that partial productivity is much more common than practitioners of this theory have commonly thought.