Les noms de résidences et d’ensembles résidentiels: entre toponyme urbain et nom commercial

Abstract

The article, which combines the perspective of onomastics and urban sociolinguistics, is an attempt at characterising a special category of proper names, which consists of the names of developers’ investments – condominiums and housing estates. On the one hand, they can be analysed as place names, as a type of urban toponyms, on the other hand, they can be treated as names of products for sale, as commercial names. As place names, they should embody the location features of the real estate, as well as be part of the toponym system of a given city. As commercial names, they should above all perform a persuasive function, creating in the mind of a receiver an attractive vision of a place of living. The aim of the article is to analyse the way in which the naming strategies applied by developers reflect this dual requirement of creating names which embody the characteristics of both urban toponyms and commercial names, on the basis of the corpus of names of investments carried out in France and in Poland.