The Pragmatics of Geographical Markers in Church Names

Abstract:

The present study examines geographical makers (GMs) in church names through corpus-driven and linguistic landscape approaches. The corpus for the study comprises thousand six hundred and fifty-four (1654) church names with 848 word types and 6600 word tokens, gathered from Ghana. I then prepared a prelist of the GMs, and used the concordance tool in AntConc to search for all the GMs in the corpus. The analysis revealed that GMs perform polypragmatic functions in church names. These functions revolved around three parameters namely church, language and people, hence church, language and people-oriented functions of GMs in church names. The GMs projected the actual and inspired identities of the churches and also revealed the churches’ locations and origins. They also served as indicators to the language-for-service policy of the churches. Finally, the study showed that the GMs marked the status of the members and would-be-members as people of the churches. The study makes a significant contribution to using corpus linguistics and linguistic landscape methodologies in church names research.