Chronotopes and commodification on the Streets of St. Charles

Abstract

New residential and commercial developments provide opportunities for ideological and semiotic work to be performed in the course of naming the development itself and streets, buildings etc. within it. This paper examines the names given within one such development in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I offer a framework to examine the semiotic work names such as these do, in which I consider place names to evoke chronotopes in order to construct a place as authentic. Relying on this constructed authenticity in selling space and the use of space within the development means that place names and the chronotopes evoked by them carry symbolic onomastic capital and are effectively commodified.