Remarks on onomastic grammar (on the example of selected foreign and Polish toponyms)

Abstract

The paper discusses regularities in the field of basic inflectional categories, i.e. those of gender, number and case of Polish and foreign toponyms. The source material is constituted by names of the countries of the world and their capital cities, as well as largest world and largest Polish cities. The analysis demonstrates that masculine gender is principally taken by toponyms with a consonant in the word-final position, feminine – by proper names ending in -a, whereas neuter – by lexemes with word-final vowels -e, -i/-y, -o as well as -u. By far the greatest number of toponyms have a singular form, only a small fraction of them are pluralia tantum, which is mainly determined by semantic factors, less frequently by historical ones. Masculine toponyms are declined according to the masculine paradigm, with foreign names as a rule having -u in Gen. sg, and Polish ones having -a. Feminine lexemes are inflected according to feminine paradigm, whereas neuter toponyms in 90% of cases remain uninflected.