- Email: [email protected]
Trade name creation: processes and patterns
REVIEWS - COMPTES-RENDUS sizrplement g&-&ateur la schema
plus profonds. unique
de Chomsky,
il n’cn
place par une procedure L’opposition source
entre
structures
de transformations, Tout
der&rement
Ross
et
par traits
un processus
de la st-uciure
cans
syntaxique.
‘transformationns?listes’
et Lakoff
preconisent
(nominalisations
, Chomsky
on await
du sens a la forme.
va pas de mCme, le sens est mis en
d’interpretation
Chomsky
!es m&mes nroprietes
dit,
de passer
‘lexicahstes’
dans ce problbme,
de certaines
Autrement
permettant
53
par
a sa
la description
exemple)
par
regles
(Remarks on nominalization) d&rim syntaxiques
places
(Deep stwture,
semantic interfiretation) a mis en valeur
dans le lexique.
surface structwe, and
un certain
nombre
de faits
(Transformations grammaticales et chasgements de signification) en a donne une discussion detaillee. Dernier Wnement important, le nouvel ~vrage de Z. S. Harris (Mathemuticai structures of language) apporte des vues t?lli~~iGZ~?t neuves sur tous ces problbmes. Lc 6omaine se developpe rapidement, SGU~;C+s mises a jour comme celle que Ruwet vient de reussir permettront aux spe& listes de se guider a l’interieur dune for& de publications qui s’etend a t&s grande vitesse, la bibliographic de Krenn et Mkllner en tCmoigne a alle seule, elle comporte sn effet 2.500 titres. Le livre brochd esL dune typographie ageable. Xl comporte une bibliograplie d’un peu plus de 500 titres, un index des noms propres, et ‘un inde Ydes mati&res. Les notes sont groupees en fin de volume, nous les pr&f&ons‘en bas de page. remettant
en question
Cent, e Universitaire
ses theories
Ex@riwntal de Viweww, 6 C.N.S.S.‘ l.abmatoire d’dutomatique Document&e et LingNistique. Adresse de l’a&w : 23, Rue du Maroc, 17 Paris Ige, France.
precedentos,
Kuroda
M. GROSS
JEAN PRANINSKAS, Trade wme creation: +rocesses and fi&erns. Janua Linguawm, Series Practica 58. Mouton, The Hague and Paris 1968. 115 pp. f 22.Few linguists today experience the exhilaration of exploring a
54
REVIE-WS
more
or less virgin
intrepid
-
territory
COMPTES-RENDUS
-
who brave
the outback
variant
of Nyangumata,
uncharted to discover
a precariously
of this monograph
few linguists, to contact
surviving
is doubly
that
is, except
a shy tribe speaking
or who scale the Bolivian dialect
fortunate:
of Quechua.
htr
subject
the an
heights
The author
is fascinatiug
not
only because of its virginity, but because of its reflection (not a particularly flattering one) of the preoccupations of modern society. Moreover, it is under our very noses. Trade name cres tion is confronting day by day hrough shops and mass media; and it is going on at such a frenz;ed rare that some advertisers (as noted on the first page of this work) fear an imminent shortage nf names even more than some of their clients fear a shortage of raw materials. Mrs. Praninskas analyses the names of 2000 products marketed in the U.S.A. (the corpus is usefully listed in an Appendix). Of these, only 33 have no discoverable origin in terms of already existing linguistic forms. In the remainder, techniques of formation are varied, but seem to have at least some precedent in general methods of neologism employed in English and other langua.ges. ticronymy is especially highly developed both on its own and in combination with other formative detices. Vtious technical categories are distinguished by the aut!lor: for example, LJUC~ (< DztPont Comfwty) is formed from initial letter-sequences; EMPAY (.< M.K., < MwwJz-Krezczer) from initial letters pronounced and spelt out syllabically. In the study of affixation, of special inter-es; are suffixes limited to commercial use (the -ex of PYREX, the -ox of CLOROX, etc.),some of them further restricted to certain classes of product (4, -on, and
-km for synthetic fibres; -0.lfor pharmaceuticals). There are cases of multi$e function, too; -ex (cf. Latin ex-) can be applied to .I preventative or curative product (ICEX gets rid of ice, DIRThX gets rid of dirt), or more vaguely, as a semantically-free trade name marker : QUIETEX,SoLIDEX,SOMINEX.
A further specialisation of morphological raWurc& is evident in the frequent commercial use of morphemes like chrom(e), aid, and ever in preference to their generally more common syr.onyms colw, he&, and always (CHROMWUN. BAND AID, EVERSHARP), a development reminiscent of the headlinese s_pecialisationof bid, quiz, scare, t0.q
etc. Leaving
‘morphemics’
for ‘syntactics’
(in :YZ own d&itions
of
REVIZ?WS
- COMPTES-RENDUE
55
these terms), Mrs. Praninskas turns to an analysis of trade name compounds, based on Lees’s transformational classification.~) Whereas English comPc;cr4s as treated by Lees, however, norma!!y consist of two free forms, most of Xrs. Praninskas’ trade name compounds contain one or more clipped elements, Thus she classifies ACE HESIVE as ‘free form plus foreclipped partial’ (from UIV adhesive) ; GLAMPOO as ‘backclipped partial plus foreclipped partial’ (presumably from gZumurous SIUZ~@X?O). These are items iyhich most of us would recognise as ‘blends or ‘portmanteau words’ rather than as ‘compounds’; and it is significant (see p. 63) that the corpus contains no examples of names beginning with a foreclipped partial (e.g. *NITY CHEST, *DOMEN-LIFT), a type which does not ccnform to the customary blend pattern of an item which begins like word x and ends like word y. Surprisingly, Mrs Pranin%s makes little use of the ‘blend’ category, 3efinmg it psychologicaily (p. 98) m terms of the ‘brashness of [t Le] insistence that t le decoder shall receive two or more messages simultaneously’. Another common compounding peculiarity suggesting the term ‘blend’ is the overlapping of medial syllables, phonemes, or letters (in the author’s terminology, ‘haplologic loss’) : HAP-P-NUT, CEDAROMA, EVEREADY. This is as much a typical development within cc,mmercial neologism as its opposite, the insertion of a ‘binding Vowel': CLAMP-O-FRAME, KUROTEX,
DAYAi.ETS.
As the Lees-type compound classification reve& there is great variety not on!y in the superficial form of compounds, but in the underlying semantico-syntactic relation between the elements. Most characteristic, however, ze compounds (failing into Lees’s Subject - Direct Object cat :gory) linking a noun denoting the product to the name of its prodacer - SCOTKINS (< ‘Scott make the napkins’), WELCHADE, WESTCLOX - and compounds of the VerbObject type which describe what a product does: FIBREGARD, TEMPGARD.WATA5iEAL.
apart from examining the form&dprocesses of trade name formation, the author devotes an introductory chapter to a thorough examination of the eccentric griphemics of trade names, and concludes with two chapters (of general rather than specialist interest) 1) Lees, R. B.,1960.The revised 1963. 124-85.
g*ammarofEnglish
REVIEWS
- COXPTES-RENDlJS
on the strategic (or what she calls ‘semantic’) and quasi-poetic aspects of the subject. There is in this work much intriguing information that cannot be summarise2~ in a review: so much might be expected from the nature of the subjecl-matter. VGA of Mrs praninskas handling of the material? It is true that the sequence of chapter headings (‘Graphemics’, ‘Morphemics’, ‘Syntactics’, ‘Semantics’, ‘Aesthetics’) is more orderly than informative; that Lees’s compound analyss is perhaps rather slavishly followed; also (to descend to the trivial) that the initial o of O-CELLO (‘sponge made of cellubse’)is perversely related to the Celtic 0 of O’Leary (p. 43) rather than to the abbreviated of of o’clock; and that F&z-is wrongly explained a5 a ‘Gaelic prefix or@&ly indicating Izatural ws oy (p. 87). However, on the whole the mater2 is competently analysed and presented. And if the ‘participant-observer’ is to be encouraged in Linguistics as in anthropology and sociology, one can only feel grateful that the first thorough exploratior. of this field has been made by someont supremely entitled to do so - an American housewife. English Defiartmetit, Universityof Lancaster, Ba%igg, Lancaster, England.
G.N. LEECH
Papers on Formal Linguistics, No. 5. Mouton, The Hague, 1968. 134 pp. Price: f IS.-. The‘and’ of the title is to be understood disjunctively: adjectives and nominalizations are dealt with in separate sections, and ‘ihere is no specific treatment of that subclass of adjectives, e.g. twc,kind, st@id etc., wXch permits of nominahzation. However, Vendler does make an ingenious attempt to link the two fields. The f&t section, ‘Nominalizations’ (1 l-32), is divided into five chapters: T, ‘Conjunctions and relative clauses’ (1 l-X+ of Uious relevance to the main argument; II, ‘l’roper nominalizations’ (26-31), which defines the scope and terminology of the next three chapters; III and IV, ‘Complete nominals’ (32-53 and ‘Incomplete nominals’ (54-7 1), di& divide those nor&& which cannot be ZENO VENDLER, Adjsctives a& m?t&t&zatims.
plus profonds. unique
de Chomsky,
il n’cn
place par une procedure L’opposition source
entre
structures
de transformations, Tout
der&rement
Ross
et
par traits
un processus
de la st-uciure
cans
syntaxique.
‘transformationns?listes’
et Lakoff
preconisent
(nominalisations
, Chomsky
on await
du sens a la forme.
va pas de mCme, le sens est mis en
d’interpretation
Chomsky
!es m&mes nroprietes
dit,
de passer
‘lexicahstes’
dans ce problbme,
de certaines
Autrement
permettant
53
par
a sa
la description
exemple)
par
regles
(Remarks on nominalization) d&rim syntaxiques
places
(Deep stwture,
semantic interfiretation) a mis en valeur
dans le lexique.
surface structwe, and
un certain
nombre
de faits
(Transformations grammaticales et chasgements de signification) en a donne une discussion detaillee. Dernier Wnement important, le nouvel ~vrage de Z. S. Harris (Mathemuticai structures of language) apporte des vues t?lli~~iGZ~?t neuves sur tous ces problbmes. Lc 6omaine se developpe rapidement, SGU~;C+s mises a jour comme celle que Ruwet vient de reussir permettront aux spe& listes de se guider a l’interieur dune for& de publications qui s’etend a t&s grande vitesse, la bibliographic de Krenn et Mkllner en tCmoigne a alle seule, elle comporte sn effet 2.500 titres. Le livre brochd esL dune typographie ageable. Xl comporte une bibliograplie d’un peu plus de 500 titres, un index des noms propres, et ‘un inde Ydes mati&res. Les notes sont groupees en fin de volume, nous les pr&f&ons‘en bas de page. remettant
en question
Cent, e Universitaire
ses theories
Ex@riwntal de Viweww, 6 C.N.S.S.‘ l.abmatoire d’dutomatique Document&e et LingNistique. Adresse de l’a&w : 23, Rue du Maroc, 17 Paris Ige, France.
precedentos,
Kuroda
M. GROSS
JEAN PRANINSKAS, Trade wme creation: +rocesses and fi&erns. Janua Linguawm, Series Practica 58. Mouton, The Hague and Paris 1968. 115 pp. f 22.Few linguists today experience the exhilaration of exploring a
54
REVIE-WS
more
or less virgin
intrepid
-
territory
COMPTES-RENDUS
-
who brave
the outback
variant
of Nyangumata,
uncharted to discover
a precariously
of this monograph
few linguists, to contact
surviving
is doubly
that
is, except
a shy tribe speaking
or who scale the Bolivian dialect
fortunate:
of Quechua.
htr
subject
the an
heights
The author
is fascinatiug
not
only because of its virginity, but because of its reflection (not a particularly flattering one) of the preoccupations of modern society. Moreover, it is under our very noses. Trade name cres tion is confronting day by day hrough shops and mass media; and it is going on at such a frenz;ed rare that some advertisers (as noted on the first page of this work) fear an imminent shortage nf names even more than some of their clients fear a shortage of raw materials. Mrs. Praninskas analyses the names of 2000 products marketed in the U.S.A. (the corpus is usefully listed in an Appendix). Of these, only 33 have no discoverable origin in terms of already existing linguistic forms. In the remainder, techniques of formation are varied, but seem to have at least some precedent in general methods of neologism employed in English and other langua.ges. ticronymy is especially highly developed both on its own and in combination with other formative detices. Vtious technical categories are distinguished by the aut!lor: for example, LJUC~ (< DztPont Comfwty) is formed from initial letter-sequences; EMPAY (.< M.K., < MwwJz-Krezczer) from initial letters pronounced and spelt out syllabically. In the study of affixation, of special inter-es; are suffixes limited to commercial use (the -ex of PYREX, the -ox of CLOROX, etc.),some of them further restricted to certain classes of product (4, -on, and
-km for synthetic fibres; -0.lfor pharmaceuticals). There are cases of multi$e function, too; -ex (cf. Latin ex-) can be applied to .I preventative or curative product (ICEX gets rid of ice, DIRThX gets rid of dirt), or more vaguely, as a semantically-free trade name marker : QUIETEX,SoLIDEX,SOMINEX.
A further specialisation of morphological raWurc& is evident in the frequent commercial use of morphemes like chrom(e), aid, and ever in preference to their generally more common syr.onyms colw, he&, and always (CHROMWUN. BAND AID, EVERSHARP), a development reminiscent of the headlinese s_pecialisationof bid, quiz, scare, t0.q
etc. Leaving
‘morphemics’
for ‘syntactics’
(in :YZ own d&itions
of
REVIZ?WS
- COMPTES-RENDUE
55
these terms), Mrs. Praninskas turns to an analysis of trade name compounds, based on Lees’s transformational classification.~) Whereas English comPc;cr4s as treated by Lees, however, norma!!y consist of two free forms, most of Xrs. Praninskas’ trade name compounds contain one or more clipped elements, Thus she classifies ACE HESIVE as ‘free form plus foreclipped partial’ (from UIV adhesive) ; GLAMPOO as ‘backclipped partial plus foreclipped partial’ (presumably from gZumurous SIUZ~@X?O). These are items iyhich most of us would recognise as ‘blends or ‘portmanteau words’ rather than as ‘compounds’; and it is significant (see p. 63) that the corpus contains no examples of names beginning with a foreclipped partial (e.g. *NITY CHEST, *DOMEN-LIFT), a type which does not ccnform to the customary blend pattern of an item which begins like word x and ends like word y. Surprisingly, Mrs Pranin%s makes little use of the ‘blend’ category, 3efinmg it psychologicaily (p. 98) m terms of the ‘brashness of [t Le] insistence that t le decoder shall receive two or more messages simultaneously’. Another common compounding peculiarity suggesting the term ‘blend’ is the overlapping of medial syllables, phonemes, or letters (in the author’s terminology, ‘haplologic loss’) : HAP-P-NUT, CEDAROMA, EVEREADY. This is as much a typical development within cc,mmercial neologism as its opposite, the insertion of a ‘binding Vowel': CLAMP-O-FRAME, KUROTEX,
DAYAi.ETS.
As the Lees-type compound classification reve& there is great variety not on!y in the superficial form of compounds, but in the underlying semantico-syntactic relation between the elements. Most characteristic, however, ze compounds (failing into Lees’s Subject - Direct Object cat :gory) linking a noun denoting the product to the name of its prodacer - SCOTKINS (< ‘Scott make the napkins’), WELCHADE, WESTCLOX - and compounds of the VerbObject type which describe what a product does: FIBREGARD, TEMPGARD.WATA5iEAL.
apart from examining the form&dprocesses of trade name formation, the author devotes an introductory chapter to a thorough examination of the eccentric griphemics of trade names, and concludes with two chapters (of general rather than specialist interest) 1) Lees, R. B.,1960.The revised 1963. 124-85.
g*ammarofEnglish
REVIEWS
- COXPTES-RENDlJS
on the strategic (or what she calls ‘semantic’) and quasi-poetic aspects of the subject. There is in this work much intriguing information that cannot be summarise2~ in a review: so much might be expected from the nature of the subjecl-matter. VGA of Mrs praninskas handling of the material? It is true that the sequence of chapter headings (‘Graphemics’, ‘Morphemics’, ‘Syntactics’, ‘Semantics’, ‘Aesthetics’) is more orderly than informative; that Lees’s compound analyss is perhaps rather slavishly followed; also (to descend to the trivial) that the initial o of O-CELLO (‘sponge made of cellubse’)is perversely related to the Celtic 0 of O’Leary (p. 43) rather than to the abbreviated of of o’clock; and that F&z-is wrongly explained a5 a ‘Gaelic prefix or@&ly indicating Izatural ws oy (p. 87). However, on the whole the mater2 is competently analysed and presented. And if the ‘participant-observer’ is to be encouraged in Linguistics as in anthropology and sociology, one can only feel grateful that the first thorough exploratior. of this field has been made by someont supremely entitled to do so - an American housewife. English Defiartmetit, Universityof Lancaster, Ba%igg, Lancaster, England.
G.N. LEECH
Papers on Formal Linguistics, No. 5. Mouton, The Hague, 1968. 134 pp. Price: f IS.-. The‘and’ of the title is to be understood disjunctively: adjectives and nominalizations are dealt with in separate sections, and ‘ihere is no specific treatment of that subclass of adjectives, e.g. twc,kind, st@id etc., wXch permits of nominahzation. However, Vendler does make an ingenious attempt to link the two fields. The f&t section, ‘Nominalizations’ (1 l-32), is divided into five chapters: T, ‘Conjunctions and relative clauses’ (1 l-X+ of Uious relevance to the main argument; II, ‘l’roper nominalizations’ (26-31), which defines the scope and terminology of the next three chapters; III and IV, ‘Complete nominals’ (32-53 and ‘Incomplete nominals’ (54-7 1), di& divide those nor&& which cannot be ZENO VENDLER, Adjsctives a& m?t&t&zatims.