Lexikografisk beskrivning av ortnamn

Resumé

Although the relative lexical frequency of proper nouns is 10 to 15 per cent of the vocabulary in most texts, only a limited number of them are listed in language dictionaries, and with very little linguistic information. Toponyms constitute, besides anthroponyms, the main representative of proper names. They deserve a specific linguistic description, all the more as complex toponyms may be formed with common nouns, adjectives and grammatical words, a fact which blurs the boundary between proper names and others. Simple as well as complex toponyms (including both endonyms and exonyms) require a formal description concerning e.g. gender, number and use of determiners. A functional analysis approach taking into account, on the one hand, appellative and proprial elements and, on the other, their generic and specific functions, aims to modelize the structures of toponyms and will pave the way to relevant contrastive analyses of toponyms in different languages, and will also help formalising alphabetic order principles. Last but not least, pragmatic information, based on corpus studies, is essential for a realistic description of the use of variant forms.