The Diachronic Maturation of Onomastics and its Convergence with Contemporary Linguistics
Abstract
This paper advances a unified thesis: the scientific maturation of onomastics is characterized by a shift from etymological cataloguing to theory‑driven, usage‑based inquiry that now aligns with structural, sociolinguistic, cognitive, and corpus‑geospatial paradigms. Drawing on selected comparative evidence (English and Uzbek onomastic traditions) and a critical synthesis of seminal works, we demonstrate three inflection points in the field’s development: (i) the structuralist consolidation of name‑formation constraints; (ii) the sociolinguistic turn to names as social variables; and (iii) the cognitive‑computational integration enabling reproducible, cross‑linguistic analyses. The findings support treating names as socio‑cognitive indices, not taxonomic exceptions, and motivate an agenda focused on multimodal evidence and ethical governance. The contribution is conceptual and methodological: it reframes onomastics as a theoretically integrated linguistic science and specifies practical pathways for cumulative, replicable research.
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