A Grammar of Places : an Analysis of City Guide

Abstract

This paper consisted of two parts. In the first part, I overviewed some studies of histories of geography. These studies paid attentions to the linguistic figurations (trope, rhetoric and metaphor) of academic descriptions, and pointed out that the forms of the past geographical works deeply intertwined the contents as the academic insistences and that behind the adoption of the specific form, the particular ideological implication did existed. The aim of this paper was to apply these arguments to the popular geographic descriptions outside academy. Though these studies focused the texualities of historical works. I centered the smaller tropes as level of one sentence. This was caused by my interest what kind of role place name as a noun plays in a sentence grammatically, and by critical comments toward the arguments about tropes. These critical comments were that the explanations about metaphor were inevitably metaphorical, and that the ideas which metaphor is needed to express a new insight assumes the meaning of a word. The second part of this paper is an analysis of the popular geographical descriptions. The object of this study is the dty guide, Tokyo Sightseeing published by Japanese publisher, Magazine House Inc. in 2002. It has characteristics of magazine and tourist guide. This text which described Tokyo as a city in English and Japanese and supposed readers of foreigners in Japan was constituted from the lot of sentences. These sentences were that the names which ranged from proper to general referred the various geographical objects from state to city and to facilities. The word of place as a general name was used as a spot to do something concrete. Place names as proper name (Odaiba, Shibuya, Roppongi) were used the destination of public transportation and the area where the reader walks around. In these description of specific behavior, Tokyo as a word of city was not appeared. 0n the other hand, at the moment that the shocks the foreign tourist encountered transformed into the recognition of cultural differences, national cultures were appeared. As a notion of national culture has a different abstract level from cartographic recognition, it was used against the idea that the name of smaller geographical scale appears easily in the sentence which expresses our familiar behavior. Between place and national culture, the word, Tokyo situated a position of the title of this text as a proper name which is able to displace the word of city as a general name, and became a Mater-Signifier.