Urbanonymic discourse in the aspect of studying territorial identity (a case study of toponymy of the Ural Federal District cities)

The article is devoted to the research of toponymic representation of territorial identity in northern cities of the Ural Federal District – Uray, Khanty-Mansyisk, Novy Urengoy, Salekhard. The authors turn to the possibilities of a dicursive approach and apply the concept of “urbanonymic discourse”, interpreting it as a set of texts of statements and arguments of the residents themselves, united in a meaningful way by the theme of the city image and its toponymy. The empirical research material was obtained through Internet surveys and expert interviews. The corpus of text material has more than 300 units. During its study, the content analysis method identifies the key characteristics that respondents give to their cities. The motivational features of urbanonyms, reflecting, in the opinion of citizens, local identity, are established by the method of contextual and semantic (onomasiological) analysis. The analysis of the obtained information demonstrates that topical visions of local identity are generally supported by the existing corpus of urban toponyms. Key characteristics that respondents give their cities/towns are reflected in the names of streets, parks and park areas, in monumentonyms and most prominent oikodomonyms. The particularities of motivational semantics of the urbanonyms mentioned in the survey answers as indicative of conveying local identity are the following: reflection of natural and historically natural flair, link with the dominant economic activity (oil and gas extraction industry), keeping the historical memory of local craft activities and people who contributed to the development of territories, meaningful references to languages and cultures of native peoples of the Urals and Siberia. The texts of expert interviews made it possible to confirm the linguacultural functions of urbanonyms and derive recommendations for municipal toponymic policy.