Language, knowledge and reality: The integrationist on name variation

This paper considers the phenomena of name variation (multiple names for the same referent) and onymic homonymy (multiple referents bearing the same name) both epistemologically and ontologically, and argues that integrationism deals with ‘reality’ in a much more satisfactory way than either realism or social constructionism. The article thus critically examines how historians and sociolinguists, who respectively adopt a surrogational and structuralist model of how names relate to the real world, have coped (or would have to cope) with complex onomastic situations; it proposes an alternative (integrational) analysis of fieldwork conducted in Bellinzona, the capital of southern Switzerland, concerning the names of its three Medieval castles.