The main idea of the article is the obvious disintegration of modern onomastics into a number of different "branches": toponymy, anthroponymics and the study of "name-in-text". Each of these branches is associated with a specific content infrastructure. The last mentioned branch of onomastics is the subject of this article, which combines purely metatheoretical and survey fragments. Much space in the work is paid to the connection between the semiotic direction in science and the study of semantic connections of the text.