Motivation of Helonyms from Anykščiai District, Utena County (1935–1937)

Abstract

The article addresses the representative examples of the semantic group of helonyms from the area of the Anykščiai subdialect of the Eastern Aukštaitian dialect. These examples were collected from the spoken language in the Lithuanian ‘Land Names’ questionnaires. The complex analysis of these onyms enabled us to establish the links existing between the elements of the unofficial toponymic village system of the interwar period and to describe them using the representative examples of the system expressed by structural and motivational models, which are based on the data about the content of the linguacultural consciousness of the community members recorded in the questionnaires, as well as geographical, cultural, and encyclopaedic information. The research highlighted the most typical phenomena that occurred in the process of naming a fragment of reality, revealed the rational, emotional, and associative relationship between the members of the ethnic domain and the marshy places in the landscape, and allowed recreating a segment of the onomastic worldview.