Place names in legal texts. Vagueness and ambiguity in the Italian Medieval Lombard kingdoms

This paper considers the role played by vagueness and ambiguity when applied to geographic referents. Through a corpus of Latin purchase and gift contracts, dating to the 8th-10th centuries and written in the Bergamo and Salerno areas during the Lombard kingdoms, the study focuses on the formula locus ubi dicitur lit. ‘place where it is called’, particularly productive and characteristic in the texts, with the aim of confronting strategies employed by Northern and Southern notaries. The analysis shows that notaries use the trigger phrase locus ubi dicitur as a strategy to highlight a difficulty in the attribution of a name to a place and, as such, can be described as a case of intentional vagueness. Relevant in the vague use of the phrase is the ambiguity of locus itself which in the documents is highly polysemous and whose meaning is characterised by an interpretative indeterminacy which is context-dependent. The analysis shows that vagueness, when applied to geographic referents, is semantic, rather than ontic, as it lies in the representation system and, thus in the representation process, not in its product.