Brand names as multimodal constructions

Abstract

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.