Results and Perspectives in the Study of Names: A Look from Oxford. Review of the book: Hough, C., & Izdebska, D. (Eds.). (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Abstract

The review provides a critical survey of the recently published volume of The Oxford Handbooks series which deals with the study of proper names. The book contains seven sections subdivided into 47 smaller chapters written by 43 scholars from 13 countries, each chapter focusing on a specific branch of onomastics. The reviewers give a detailed account of the first three sections of the book which deal with general issues in the theory of onomastics and with various aspects of toponomastics and anthroponomastics. The last four parts (outlining achievements in literary onomastics, socio-onomastics, inter-disciplinary name studies and the study of peripheral types of names) are reviewed in a more general way. The reviewers conclude that, due to the scale of the issues discussed in the book, the variety of linguistic evidence and sources cited by the international team of authors, the typological treatment of onomastic data, the exposition of both classical and innovative approaches, as well as to a solid list of references, the reviewed edition can serve as a valuable source of information about the main branches of onomastics, its results and perspectives. It also convinces of the importance of a closer cooperation between different national schools of onomastic studies, since it appears that some of the topics discussed in the handbook are more and better elaborated in Russian onomastics.

Keywords

• name studies
• handbook of onomastics
• theoretical onomastics
• toponymy
• anthroponymy
• literary onomastics
• socio-onomastics
• peripheral classes of names