Contemporary Chinese Place Names: Names of Administrative Divisions at County and City Level

This book is dedicated to various aspects of contemporary Chinese place names, their structural and semantic features, as well as naming phenomena present in Chinese toponymy. The structural analysis deals with the division of placename words into generic and specific, and the classification of Chinese generics and specifics according to their morphological structure. The classification of toponyms as derivations from other words is also discussed. This study analyses the semantic content of toponyms, dealing with their meaning as proper names, and classifies them into nine main categories according to their origin. The study is based on a corpus of 1973 names of administrative units at the county and city level of 20 provinces of the People’s Republic of China.