Precedent in Urban Commercial Naming

Abstract

This article, on the one hand, continues to consider precedent names in the urban commercial naming in the cultural and communicative aspect, begun by the author together with Elena N. Remchukova, on the other hand, demonstrates the possibilities of naming research, which combines pragmatic, psycholinguistic and legal perspectives. The possibilities and features of commercial naming are analyzed using the example of strong and weak precedent names used in the names of cafes, restaurants, hotels, residential complexes, shops, beauty salons and other urban facilities. When analyzing the use of the naming model based on precedent names (anthroponyms, toponyms, names of literary works, films, etc.), not only the intentions and motivations of the nominators are taken into account, but also the perception of the names included in the city onomasticon by the addressee — the consumer of goods and services. The article examines the results of an association survey conducted by the author to identify “feedback” and determine the precedentiality degree of 150 commercial urbanonyms, summarizes the preliminary results of a psycholinguistic study, indicating the stability of precedent names and precedent statements of the core zone of the cognitive base, learned in the process of mastering the school educational program, and a decrease in the level of precedentiality (transition from strong to weak) of the golden fund of Russian cinema, foreign historical figures, literary and artistic figures. The article demonstrates that a high degree of precedentiality ensures the commercial success of an enterprise but makes it difficult to secure the legal status of a name as a means of individualization, which forces the nominator to widely use non-verbal precedent phenomena as part of a multimodal commercial urbanonym. The low precedentiality degree of the name — the source of the nomination — contributes to greater individualization of the commercial enterprise but narrows the circle of consumers of goods and services.