The Language of Fashion from a Multidimensional Perspective

Although fashion influences global society in different ways, this domain has received little attention from corpus and linguistic studies perspective. Most studies looking at the verbal language of fashion focus on topics such as terminology, cross-language borrowing, and social semiotics. There is a lack of studies on fashion from a discourse perspective. To fill this gap, this chapter presents a study whose goal is to detect the major discourses in the domain of fashion in English texts. A register-diversified corpus of fashion-related texts was compiled, including a wide range of varieties, namely newspaper and magazine articles, television programs, social media posts, blogs, documentaries, academic texts, fiction books, and films. The corpus was analyzed using Lexical Multidimensional analysis (LMD) (Sardinha and Pinto, Multi-dimensional analysis: Research methods and current issues. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), which derives from the MD analysis framework (Biber, Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press, 1988). LMD Analysis enables the identification of the lexical parameters of variation across the texts, which are detected statistically using factor analysis. Methodologically, the corpus was tagged for POS and lemmatized, the most frequent lemmas were selected and entered in a factor analysis, and the resulting factors were interpreted as dimensions. Each text in the corpus was scored on each of the dimensions, and the scores were compared across the different registers. The dimensions, which will be introduced and illustrated in the chapter, correspond to the major discourses on which the domain of fashion relies for a range of business and social goals, such as marketing, social influencing, and trendsetting.