THE CONCEPTUAL SPACE OF COMMERCIAL OIKODOMONYMS IN THE CONTEXT OF PSYCHOLOGY OF NEEDS (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF NAMES OF NEW BUILDINGS IN KYIV)

Abstract

As a consequence of the new social and cultural reality of the consumer society, marketing phenomena become actively present in the nomination of urban facilities. The drift of toponymic practices towards advertising makes tangible adjustments to the urbanonymic space causing its qualitative (marked by the emergence of interdisciplinary concepts and terms) and quantitative (rapid growth of the groups of onyms that used to be peripheral due to their small number) changes. In the context of paradigm changes, the proper name of a building – oikodomonym – steadily acquires the features of an advertising name – commercial oikodomonym. The subordination of commercial oikodomonym to the laws of advertising communication leads to the loss of topographical feature and to the acquisition of the influential potential, which is most vividly manifested in names focused on form, i.e. with an expressive figurative and symbolic component.
In this article, figurative and symbolic commercial oikodomonyms are considered from the viewpoint of the strategy of persuasion implemented in them, aimed at shifting the buyer’s value system by modeling the buyer’s attitude to the future housing. As a rule, the lexical marker concept informs that the buyer is offered not just a residential property item, but a house «with a meaning», which allows such names to be called conceptual as well. In commercial oikodomonyms of this type, there is always an idea about the value (meaning) of the residential property item for the buyer, not necessarily related to the characteristics of the building itself, but necessarily correlated with the buyer’s psychological needs. The article describes commercial oikodomonyms, which actualize, by means of a symbol, the «intangible asset» of the residential property item offered to the buyer in the form of a feeling of security and comfort, status myth, a feeling of satisfaction with oneself and one’s achievements, power, the opportunity to express oneself in creativity, to love and be loved, a sense of roots, a feeling of invulnerability in the face of time, and symbolic immortality. The statistical density of the names addressing these or those psychological phenomena demonstrates the consumer priorities of modern metropolitan society in the conceptual space of residential property.