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Brand names as multimodal constructions

  • Alexander Dübbert EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 3, 2021
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 7 Issue 1

Abstract

Brand names are a common part of the everyday consumer environment, and can be found on countless visual surfaces such as food packaging. A key characteristic of brand names is their fixed design. Many brand names owe their linguistic form to units that originally did not constitute proper names. They developed into brand names through complex sub-processes of what is commonly referred to as onymisation. These processes include semantic, morphological and phonological/graphemic changes. The aim of this paper is to explore how the specific typographic design of a brand name can be an additional indicator in its process of onymisation. After clarifying the concepts of onymisation and typographic design, an extended multimodal construction model is presented. The basis of the paper is an analysis of a corpus of image data comprising more than 600 photographs of food packaging. In order to get a first impression of how the multimodal constructions of brand names could look, an omission test following a suggestion by Ziem, Alexander. 2017. Do we really need a multimodal construction grammar? Linguistics Vanguard 3(s1). 1–9 is applied to the data.

Keywords: brand names; construction grammar; multimodality; onymisation; typographic design
Corresponding author: Alexander Dübbert, Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften, Universität Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany, E-mail:

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Received: 2019-12-23
Accepted: 2021-04-22
Published Online: 2021-09-03

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0058
Keywords for this article
brand names; construction grammar; multimodality; onymisation; typographic design

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial Note
  2. Editorial note
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
  5. Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
  6. Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
  7. The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
  8. Morphology & Syntax
  9. Brand names as multimodal constructions
  10. NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
  11. A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
  12. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
  13. Semantics & Pragmatics
  14. Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Current trends in grammar writing
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
  19. Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
  20. Language Acquisition and Language Learning
  21. Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
  22. Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
  23. Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
  24. “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
  25. The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
  26. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
  27. An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns
  28. A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
  29. The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
  30. In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
  31. Cognitive Linguistics
  32. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  33. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  34. Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
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