De nom de marca registrada a nom comú: el procés de generalització

Allés Sales, Maria

De nom de marca registrada a nom comú: el procés de generalització

License

Citation

Allés Sales, M. De nom de marca registrada a nom comú: el procés de generalització. 2016. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/28017

This citation was generated automatically.

Abstract

In daily language, speakers use many trademarks instead of their respective generic words. This is known as generalization and it happens because of many reasons, even because speakers do not know that some words they use are not common nouns, but proper nouns. The aim of this paper is to examine which trademarks are more prone to be generalized in the Catalan-speaking society, which linguistic reasons explain this phenomenon and if the dialect and the age of the speakers are factors that influence some trademarks of being generic. With this purpose, I analyse the trademarks formation processes and the morphology of the 28 most generalized trademarks obtained from the results of some reviews. These data are collected through a survey composed of 53 images of different products that participants (Catalan speakers of any age and dialect) had to name using a term they would employ to refer to these objects in an informal situation. The results show that the shortest trademarks (formed by a single lexical unit) are the most inclined to be generalized. However, marketing also influences this process. Regarding sociolinguistic factors, the outcomes verify that the dialect and the age persuade some trademarks of being generic depending on the territory and the generation of the participants.