Industrial Culture in the Mirror of Ekaterinburg Urbanonymy

This article is devoted to a linguocultural study of urbanonyms of Ekaterinburg in the context of representation of industrial culture. Factories have played a pivotal role in the development of the sociocultural environment of the Ural city and in the exploration of its physical space. As proper names of topographic objects are closely related to the particularities of the spiritual and material culture of a society, the urbanonyms of Ekaterinburg can be regarded as a transmitter of value-based perceptions connected to the dynamics of the city’s industrial life. The article describes semantic variants of objectification of the “industrial” nomination theme in urban toponyms of Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) and attempts to reveal the topicality of industrial culture for the modern urbanonymic nomination. The language material of the research involves urbanonyms from several types of proper names (horonyms, hodonyms, agoronyms, monumentonyms, and partially oikodomonyms) collected from written sources — formal, scholarly, and journalistic texts. The main method of interpreting the empiric material is the onomasiological analysis of the inner form of toponyms followed by linguocultural comments on the motivational meanings. The chosen research technique makes it possible to determine the implementation of a wide range of nomination variants in the framework of the large “industrial” theme. Urbanonyms emphasize the spatial proximity of the named topographic items to factories and plants, express respect for the working people in general and representatives of different professions in particular, verbalize the relation with manufacturing processes and production, posit the semantic reference to industrial towns and settlements. The analysis carried out proves that the toponymic implementation of the “industrial” theme dating back to the eighteenth century is still going on at present, albeit moving to new spheres of designation (art-clusters), yet maintaining its role in preserving the Ural identity.