The Syntactic analysis of Koyo compound toponyms
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55595/hjdj1r16Keywords:
syntactic analysis, Koyo toponym, phrasal toponym, sentential toponym, merger.Abstract
This paper presents a syntactic analysis of Koyo toponyms. It aims to identify the different categories of Koyo toponyms and to determine the syntactic patterns underlying their formation. Data were collected by questionnaire and interviews with native speakers of Koyo, and the analysis follows the Minimalist Program developed by Chomsky (1995 and subsequent work). The results show that Koyo toponyms share the same syntactic properties as other Determiner Phrases in the language in terms of collocation and merger, and that they fall into two basic types: phrasal toponyms and sentential toponyms. At the phrasal level, six patterns are attested: Noun+Noun, Noun+Preposition+Noun,Adjective+Noun,Noun+Number,Noun+Preposition+Adjective, and Quantifier+Noun. At the sentential level, Koyo toponyms take the form of simple sentences (imperative) or compound sentences (coordinate or subordinate clauses). These findings show that Koyo toponyms are not an isolated naming system but a crystallized subset of the ordinary phrase- and clause-structure of the language, in which syntax simultaneously encodes geographical reference and cultural memory.
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