Cultural Linguistics Perspective on the Conceptualization of Clothing Terminology

The present study attempts to contribute to the notion of cultural cognition (Sharifian 2011) through close inspection of the less investigated issue that correlates the cultural conceptualization of clothes and the conceptualization of the body and its arrangement in space. The study is couched on the theoretical assumptions that cognitive reality is the outcome of culture and that language is intimately structured and bound to embodied experience. A dataset of clothing terminology retrieved from The Fairchild Books Dictionary of Fashion (Tortora and Keiser, The Fairchild books dictionary of fashion. Fairchild Publications, New York, 2014) is assembled to show how such terms are coined in accordance with concepts related to cultural and spatial experience. It is shown that cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian, Cultural linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2017) and idealized cognitive models (Johnson, The meaning of the body. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007) shape the construction of meaningful lexemes in clothing terminology, and they prove to be explanatory means to achieve an understanding of the complex system of knowledge that comes into play when we coin and understand such terms.