French equivalents of Polish geographical names. The exonymization in French of toponyms on the Polish territory.
Małgorzara MANDOLA
Date and place of defense: July 6, 2017, University Rennes 2 Director: Marie-Claude Le Bot (University Rennes 2) President of the jury: Pierre Larrivée (University Caen) Members of the jury:- Jean-Louis Vaxelaire (University Namur)
- Natalie Küber (University Paris Diderot)
Abstract
The most recent linguistic studies admit that proper names are often translated, or adapted, as opposed to the old theories about the non-translatability of proper names. What distinguishes toponyms from the rest of onomastics are the political, sociological, and historical implications of many geographical names. Saying “Breslau” for the Polish city “Wrocław” can have a negative connotation depending on the context. And yet, we encounter this form very frequently on the Internet. Moreover, with globalization we observe the multiplication of many versions of the same toponym. The work presented here is composed of three parts. The first part briefly presents the theories concerning proper names, but adapted to toponyms, and the second describes their functions, as well as their linguistic status in relation to international standardization. The concept of synchronic-contrastive toponymy and the methods of toponym analysis according to this approach are introduced in part 2. Part three is a corpus analysis which aims to observe the structures and integration of Polish toponyms in the French language as well as their popular usage in everyday publications (on the Internet, in tourist brochures, in applications and social networks, etc.), which differs from the official, supposedly politically correct usage.
Keywords: Synchronic linguistics, translatology, proper names — Poland — Linguistic variation, contrastive linguistics, toponymy, descriptive linguistics, Polish (language) — eponyms http://www.theses.fr/2017REN20025