Review of Toponymic Studies of Altai and Siberia in the Anthropocentric Paradigm

Abstract

At the turn of the 20th–21st centuries there appeared a trend of appeal to the anthropocentric paradigm for scientific knowledge in the toponymic studies. In the previous period, the toponymic studies relied upon the properties of toponyms as language units at the semantic, structural, and grammatical levels. At the same time, the ethnocultural aspect of the geographic names manifesting the ethnocultural stereotypes for exploring the world, and, wider, for the worldview of both contemplating man and acting man remained outside the scope of linguistic studies. Rooted in the integrative approach to analysis of linguistic phenomena, the anthropocentrism principles determined a qualitatively new stage of research based on activating the cognitive structures of mental knowledge. Thus, the presented review shows that toponyms are an important source of ethnocultural information that can be extracted through cognitive modelling and linguistic and cultural interpretation within the framework of the anthropocentric paradigm. In the future, the applied methods of toponymic research can be extrapolated to other sources of linguistic and cultural information