| The present study attempts to reveal trademarks in the language system.Trademarks are officially registered and legally protected names that individualize entire groups of homogeneous goods from one manufacturer.The main economic functions of a trademark are the individualization and identification of a certain type of product,informing the buyer about it,drawing his attention to the product,guaranteeing the high quality and reliability of the product,advertising and encouraging the buyer to purchase this product.To realize these functions,a trademark must evoke positive associations,be well pronounced and memorized,be concise,catchy and unique.In the thesis trademarks are perceived as linguistic units,a part of the language system,meaningful lexical units,neologisms with pragmatic potential.Thus,they are called “verbal trademarks”.For a long time,trademarks interested only marketers and advertising specialists.Today,as a result of the emergence of numerous names of goods and services(there are millions registered trademarks in the world,and thousands of names are registered daily)and a high degree of their reproducibility in various communicative situations,linguists have begun to pay attention to this layer of vocabulary.But many linguistic aspects of trademarks are not studied completely.Most linguistic works are typological researches and classifications.The task of the work is to prove that verbal trademarks are proper names,to examine their word-formation and semantics.The thesis is divided into four parts.Chapter 2 is conducted to the literature review on the selected topic,previous consideration of trademarks as a part of the language system.Chapter 3 provides theoretical framework adopted for the study to be carried out.Chapter 4 related to the research of trademarks from the linguistic point of view.It presents detailed structural and semantic characteristics of verbal trademarks.Furthermore,it gives verbal trademarks a place in onomastics.Chapter 5studies collected data on the basis of the previous chapter and provides comparative analysis.In the given study verbal trademarks are considered,first of all,from the point of view of onomastics.Onomastics is a linguistic discipline that studies different types of proper names.Verbal trademarks are in all respects correlated with onomastic vocabulary,although they have a number of specific features.Based on the first part of the study,it is legitimate to highlight verbal trademarks in a special category of proper names.Also,in the first part word-formation of verbal trademarks were studied.Verbal trademarks are formal constructs,chains of phonemes or combinations of affixes.The word-formation methods of verbal trademarks turn out to be very unusual in view of the fact that they are used to achieve attractiveness.In the thesis there are two main groups of word-formation methods separated: semantic and grammatical.In the first case,the formation of trademarks occurs without changing the form.In the second case,there is a process of forming a name using some derivational elements(affixation,pluralization,singularization,etc.),or on a syntactic basis(phrase names).Lexical foundation of these units is reasonably various and can carry out the particular information.Under the information of a trademark we understand the complex of information that can be obtained from a verbal trademark by any speaker of this language or by a specialist as a result of research.The language information of a trademark is composed of such factors as: language affiliation,specifity of finals,lexical meanings of the stem.A verbal trademark,like any derivative word,has the property of double reference.This property is that,when pointing to a particular product or service(a fragment of reality),it refers us to the world of things and has a certain lexical meaning.And this meaning is built using the connotation of another word,and indicates the type of connection between the derivative and units of which it is derived.The previous allows us to determine the existence of the word-formationmeaning.Thus,word-formation of trademarks is a separate subsystem within the onomastic word formation with its specific types and methods.Another important idea of the thesis is that motivation and the inner form of verbal trademarks is included in its semantic structure.In the process of naming,the nominator identifies a certain essential feature of the named object,which becomes the motivational one.The choice of the motivational attribute is not random,but rather a conscious of a nominator and due to the nature of the nomination object.Main functions of verbal trademarks,individualization,identification and differentiation,in relation to groups of similar products of other manufacturers is accompanied by the function of advertising,attracting attention and pragmatic impact on the recipient,encouraging him to purchase the corresponding product.The fulfilment of this function,distinguishing verbal trademarks among other proper names,is based on their internal form,which,having thus functional significance,is included in the semantic structure of these linguistic units.Thus,two components are distinguished in the semantics of a verbal trademark: denotative of a proper name meaning itself,expressed in the correlation of a verbal trademark with the designated product,and the connotative element,which consists in the internal form of a name.Different verbal trademarks are of a different nature.In some,it brings the trademark closer to common nouns,as it connects them with the denotative meaning due to transmitted intentional signs.In others,it only brings a positive value or originality.In accordance with these differences,the given study proposes to divide trademarks gradually into several types depending on their internal form and degree of information:1)explicitly informative verbal trademarks: containing information about the product group.Verbal trademarks of this type are motivated semantically,since information of this kind can only be expressed verbally.2)implicitly informative verbal trademarks,which include denotative semanticfeatures that are common with the general designation of the product or addressee,which are more expressive and allow to attribute them to a certain type of product due to the presence of associative connection with the corresponding concept.3)uninformative verbal trademarks,according to the inner form of which it is impossible to conclude what kind of goods they designate.The motivational structure of verbal trademarks is also different.Among verbal trademarks,it is necessary to single out semantically and form motivated units.Moreover,of particular interest is the study of the motivational structure of verbal trademarks of non-informative names,since their inner form gives the only key to understanding the unit.Most semantically motivated non-informative verbal trademarks are formed according to the principle of metaphor.The widespread use of metaphor in creating verbal trademarks is explained by its compactness,imagery and high pragmatic potential.This type of verbal trademarks allows putting an emphasis not on the consumer qualities of the product itself,since they are basically the same for goods of different companies.In the case of semantically motivated non-informative verbal trademarks,there is no direct semantic relationship between the product and its name,as in the group of informative verbal trademarks,however,there is a symbolic connotative-aggregative relationship emphasizing the positive properties of the goods.Form motivated verbal trademarks include units motivated graphically or phonetically.Non-informative verbal trademarks of this group are most conventional in relation to the goods designated by them.The greatest role in them is played by the sound of the name-its length,the number of syllables,the ease of articulation when pronouncing.The above scheme of distinguishing verbal trademarks according to the degree of informativity and the type of motivation serves as a scheme for the analysis of lexical material in the second part of the work.The material for the structural and semantic analysis is verbal trademarks of three groups of goods – cosmetics,sporting goods and furniture(1000 names for each group are used).The comparative analysis of verbal trademarks of the considered three groups of goods determine the most common similarities and differences between verbal trademarks of different groups.Verbal trademarks of sporting goods and cosmetic products are semantically and structurally closer to each other,while verbal trademarks of furniture reveal more differences with respect to the first two groups of goods,which is due to extralinguistic factors.Direct indication of a product prevails also in verbal trademarks of sport and cosmetic products,but it makes up a very small fraction of verbal trademarks of furniture.This can be explained by the greater need for the distinctive function of verbal trademarks of furniture,as a more expensive product.The trademark for many years should continue to perform this function in relation to the newly created verbal trademarks.At the same time,in colloquial speech,these units are used much less frequently than,for example,the names of cosmetic goods that are supposed to bought about every month.Thus,there is no need for the image of the called object to appear in the recipient's mind when perceiving verbal trademark of furniture.The names of sport and cosmetic products appear much more often in everyday speech,and should be “understandable”,hence,there is their informational content.Verbal trademarks of sporting products and cosmetics are mostly semantically motivated names.Most trademarks of furniture are artificially created words from an arbitrary set of letters and numbers that do not have support in the vocabulary of any existing natural language.Implicitly informative verbal trademarks of different groups of goods also differ from each other.Therefore,while implicitly informative verbal trademarks of sporting goods are most often constructed on the basis of vocabulary related exactly to the sport themes,then vocabulary related to the cosmetic using does not participate in the names of this type of product.The associativity of cosmetic names is achieved by modifying the root morphemes of the common nouns-their truncation,otherchanges in the structure and sound,requiring certain mental operations from the recipient to decrypt the information contained in the verbal trademark.A common feature of verbal trademarks of the considered product groups is the participation of all word-formation methods in the creation of nomination units.The most common are compounding and derivation.Also,when creating all three groups of verbal trademarks,transonymization(i.e.transfer of a proper name from one object to another)is used.In verbal trademarks of cosmetics anthroponyms are the most common.In verbal trademarks of sport and furniture products toponyms are especially popular.In verbal trademarks of all three groups of goods,the name of the manufacturer is often included,which is most typical for verbal trademarks of sporting goods,for which it is a guarantee of quality and thereby performs an advertising function.On the contrary,in the verbal trademarks of cosmetic products,the associative semantics of the name plays more important role.The comparative analysis of the associative semantics of verbal trademarks of the considered groups once again testifies to the similarity of verbal trademarks of sport and cosmetic products,which is manifested primarily in their greater associativity compared to verbal trademarks of furniture,as well as in the active use of a number of semes.Among them semantic groups of “comfort of using”,“superiority”,“new technologies”,“animals”,“professionalism” and others are common.At the same time some common associative-semantic models were also found,for example,those that indicate uniqueness of implementation,composition,environmental friendliness of the product,place and purpose of its use,and also such a characteristic as “nobility”.The results of the study can be used in the development of issues of onomastics and the linguistic field of verbal trademarks.The thesis material can be used in lexicographical practice for compiling dictionaries and encyclopedias of commercial neologisms.The conducted research not only proves the advisability of the linguistic study of verbal trademarks,but also outlines the ways for further research of theselanguage units.Thus,the study of the functioning of verbal trademarks in advertisement,in colloquial speech and literature remained outside the scope of this work.Of interest is the consideration of verbal trademarks in the diachronic aspect,as well as a comparative analysis of verbal trademarks of other groups. |
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