Nimetamise Strateegiatest Eesti Kultuuris

The pretension of scientific methods and conclusions makes semiotics a strikingly often totalitarian discipline. Naming strategies in Estonian culture. Edited by Ülle Pärli and Eva Lepik. UT publishing house, 2008. 290 pages. In the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu, under the leadership of associate professor Ülle Pärli, among other things, theoretical and practical issues related to (proper) names have been studied for many years. The best part of the fruits of this activity has now become available to everyone in the collection of articles "Naming strategies in Estonian culture". As mentioned above, the specification of place in the title is a bit imprecise and misleading, because more than a third of the book's 13 articles, including two translations, do not even mention the Estonian context; in the rest it is often only an illustration of the theory. The editor Ülle Pärli writes in the introduction: "the name is understood quite broadly in the works collected in this collection" (p. 8), it is mostly "treated as a social sign that acquires meaning from a non-linguistic context and also characterizes this context" (ibid.). Pärli emphasizes that "the connection of the name with the context is a prerequisite for any kind of analysis" (p. 9).