Linguistic means of representing the “Bad style in clothing” concept (part one)

Abstract

The article analyses the corpus of English utterances used by native speakers to express their negative evaluation of someone’s looks and preferences in style, with the range of subjects including high-profile persons, politicians, relatives, co-workers, etc. Relevance of the research is explained through the need to identify and categorise existing ways to represent negative evaluation of vestimentary items in the English language. Considering the fact that clothes serve as one of the most important criteria of belonging to a particular cultural community, defining the particularities of clothing that representatives of the abovementioned community deem as alien, inadequate or inconsistent with their norms can help to avoid communicative mishaps and lead to greater understanding. The scope of the research included modern English-language sources (British, American and Australian): professional fashion magazines, fiction films, and television shows, and consisted of 307 contexts. The analysis outlined 34 conceptual fields used to structure the category of negative evaluation of taste in clothing. This article focuses on such conceptual fields as “Clothes”, “Household item”, “Profession”, “Place”, and “History”. The choice of the conceptual fields for the analysis is based on the fact that they are actualised by the native speakers of both British and American variants of English, which proves that the language of fashion is a cross-border phenomenon with a set of its own unique individuals/artifacts features. To explore the means to verbalise negative evaluation of style in clothing semantic and conceptual analyses methods were used. In conclusion the opinion on the perspectives of further research into the means to represent negative evaluation in fashion discourse and its conceptual basis is stated.