Bohemian Manchester, Moravian Klondike and Silesian Versailles: Attributive structures of foreign place names in contemporary Czech journalism
Abstract
Exonyms - i.e. toponyms of the type Rakousko, Benátky [Austria, Venice] - were introduced to the Czech landscape (along with foreign endonyms) in medieval times. In the 19th century a new, specific application of foreign place names began to appear, and it is this development that forms the focus of the present article.
Such words began to feature in attributive structures of the type český, pražský [Czech or Bohemian, Prague?s] + exonym/foreign endonym; many of these structures came into widespread use referring to areas whose boundaries were unclearly delineated or defined, or they served the purposes of marketing and advertising. The analysis presented in this article is based on the SYN PUB component of the Czech National Corpus, and it focuses on the collocations of the lemmas český/moravský/slezský [Czech or Bohemian/Moravian/Silesian] + exonym/foreign endonym, aiming to offer an insight into the reasons underlying the use of such structures in contemporary journalism.