Between the local and the global – restaurant names in Poland, Germany, and China

Abstract

The paper offers a contrastive analysis of Polish, German, and Chinese names of eating places, seen as chrematonyms or, more specifically, as urbochrematonyms. Names of restaurants, eateries, and cafés result from human activity and are permanently inscribed into the linguistic landscape of a city. Restaurant names present in urban space often serve as the first, or even main, point of contact between the local community and other cultures. They form the background for cultural exchange and provide evidence of the diversity and multi-ethnicity of the communities living within the same city. They are a way to articulate the identity of ethnic minorities. The research question we attempt to answer in this analysis is whether the word-formation means used to shape the formal and semantic structure of restaurant names exhibit specifically local features – i.e., those typical of a given urban and cultural space and its traditions – or whether they are global, universal, and repetitive, i.e., language- and culture-independent. The language data were retrieved using a search engine available at https://www.tripadvisor.com and consist of three hundred restaurant names evaluated by customers as the best eating places in Krakow, Berlin, and Dalian. Subsequently, the collection of urbochrematonyms was further supplemented with examples drawn from other internet sources in order to collect restaurant names that best reflect the observed trends. The excerpted data were analysed in terms of the lexico-semantic material and the structural patterns used in the composition of urban chrematonyms.