Place facets: a systematic literature review

Place and place names: a unified model

The goal of this paper is to offer a unified account of Place as a central theoretical notion across different disciplines. We show that while psychology, geography and other sciences have been converging to a unified view of this notion, linguistics still offers a fragmented perspective. Consequently, place names lack a full-fledged analysis that connects this category to the psychological concept of place. We propose to overcome this impasse by introducing a multi-modal Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) account of place as a conceptual construct and place concepts as specific instances of this construct. We show that current variants of DRT permit us to model place names and their senses, i.e., the meaning(s) that individuals associate with Sydney. We then model non-linguistic place concepts, i.e., the mental representation(s) that individuals can have of the city carrying this name. We present a model of the relation between linguistic meaning and conceptual content via the notion of anchoring relations applied to place. We pair this formal treatment with a morpho-syntactic account of place names building on current generative syntax treatments of proper names. Once we have a morpho-syntactic and semantic model of place names, we use a frame semantics treatment to account for lexical relations among place names. We test the overarching model on a set of recalcitrant problems afflicting current linguistic and multi-disciplinary treatments of place. These are the grammatical complexity and lexical content of place names, place concepts and their networks, and inter-subjective, communicative models of place in discourse. By solving these problems, our account integrates several frameworks (DRT, conceptual analysis, generative syntax, frame semantics) and connects several disciplines (linguistics, psychology, geographic information science, communication models) via a novel, multi-modal account of place. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical import of these results.

Cultural Heritage, Sense of Place and Tourism: An Analysis of Cultural Ecosystem Services in Rural Hungary

The paper focuses on three dimensions of Cultural Ecosystem Services—cultural heritage, sense of place and tourism—and examines the relationships between them in a rural landscape context. Sense of place connects to landscapes that foster authentic human attachment, cultural heritage values and elements of local history and culture. This suggests that a sense of place cannot be considered in isolation from cultural heritage. However, cultural heritage has been relatively under-researched in the context of cultural ecosystem services, where it is defined as the tangible and intangible benefits that are derived mostly from landscapes. Researchers in rural development have highlighted the importance of sense of place and cultural heritage in both place-making and tourism development. This study explores these relationships further using three case studies from rural Hungary based on in-depth interviews with local stakeholders. The findings demonstrate that cultural heritage is an inherent part of rural place-making in Hungary and that cultural heritage values strongly shape a sense of place. Social and intangible aspects of cultural heritage are the most important for place-making, especially authentic local traditions. The findings suggest that even though a strong sense of place based on cultural heritage is a pre-requisite for tourism development, initiatives have often been more successful in strengthening social cohesion and cultural identity rather than attracting tourists.