STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF ISCRIPTIONS ON CLOTHING: LEVEL OF PHRASE(ON THE MATERIAL OF ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN LANGUAGES)

Abstract

Though the growing popularity of clothing with text prints causes the study of the inscriptions on clothing as a linguistic phenomenon there are only few papers devoted to this topic. The present research is an attempt to analyse the structure of English and Ukrainian clothing inscriptions in a comparative aspect. The study focuses on defining the main features of clothing inscriptions on the level of phrase. It deals with 2286 English and 1216 Ukrainian inscriptions on clothing harvested on the internet by employing a continuous sampling method.

The paper shows that phrase-inscriptions are evenly typical of English and Ukrainian linguocultural environments and make up a quarter of the entire data under analysis. The peculiarities of the source from which the units were collected allows us to identify three main sub-groups of phrase-inscriptions: coordinative phrases, subordinate phrases and mixed phrases. Isomorphic and allomorphic models of phrase-inscriptions are considered within each subgroup. It has been determined that the vast majority of phrase-inscriptions in both languages are subordinate phrases. However, coordinative phrases are three times more typical of English inscriptions on clothing. Moreover, three adjectival coordinative models have been identified as allomorphic for the English language.

The research proves that the structure of both English and Ukrainian clothing phrase-inscriptions reflects the realization of the wearer’s need in self-presentation. It is implemented with the variety of models, the use of adjectives of positive semantics and visual means of emphasis. At the same time, the structural and grammatical features of the studied languages, such as the analytical nature of English and the synthetic nature of Ukrainian, also influence the structural peculiarities of the analyzed texts.