Naming and Framing
This book offers an innovative, unified theoretical model for better
understanding the processes underpinning naming and framing
and the power that words exert over human minds.
The volume integrates theoretical paradigms and empirical
insights from across a broad array of research disciplines, several of
which have not been combined before, and uses this foundation as a
point of departure for introducing its four-layered model of distinct
but connected levels of analysis. Bringing insights from cognitive
linguistics and psycholinguistics together with multimodal perspec-
tives, Smith establishes new cross-disciplinary links, further inte-
grating work from neighbouring fields such as marketing, health
communication, and political communication, that indicate paths
for future research and implications for communicative ethics and
fairness.
This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars
in multimodality, communication, semiotics, cognitive psychology,
and linguistics, as well as those in related disciplines such as mar-
keting, political communication, and health communication.
Viktor Smith has a PhD in International Business Communication
and is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management,
Society, and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. His
key research interest is the way in which words in combination with
other carriers of communicative content (pictures, colours, sym-
bols, numbers, shapes, flavours, etc.) not only reflect, but shape
the world around us, and the way we see it. Over the years, he has
pursued and developed this interest both in cross-disciplinary theo-
retical work and relative to practice-oriented endeavours spanning
from the convergence of European legal cultures to the develop-
ment of best practices for fair consumer communication through
product packaging design.
Routledge Studies in Multimodality
Edited by Kay L. O’Halloran, Curtin University
Shifts towards Image-centricity in Contemporary Multimodal
Practices
Edited by Hartmut Stöckl, Helen Caple and Jana Pflaeging
Transmediations
Communication Across Media Borders
Edited by Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström
Multimodal Approaches to Media Discourses
Reconstructing the Age of Austerity in the United Kingdom
Edited by Tim Griebel, Stefan Evert and Philipp Heinrich
Designing Learning with Embodied Teaching
Perspectives from Multimodality
Fei Victor Lim
Kinesemiotics
Modelling How Choreographed Movement Means in Space
Arianna Maiorani
Naming and Framing
Understanding the Power of Words across Disciplines,
Domains, and Modalities
Viktor Smith
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.
routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Multimodality/book-series/
RSMM
Naming and Framing
Understanding the Power of Words
across Disciplines, Domains,
and Modalities
Viktor Smith
First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Viktor Smith to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may
be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 9780367509217 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781003051831 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
0.1 What’s in a Name – What’s in a Frame? 1
0.2 Aims and Scope 4
0.3 Cross-Disciplinary Positioning 8
1 Naming & Framing at Level 1: Having a Name for It 11
1.1 Naming Something Is Having It, but Who’s
to Decide? 11
1.2 What Language(s) May and Must 13
1.3 From ad-hoc Categories to First Candidates
for Naming 18
1.3.1 The Anatomy of Human Concepts 19
1.3.2 A Dynamic Approach to Human
Categorization 21
1.4 Success Criteria for Naming at Level 1
Revisited 25
2 Naming & Framing at Level 2: The Joyce Principle 27
2.1 Juliet’s Wisdom versus Joyce’s Creativity 27
2.2 Limits to Lexical Arbitrariness: Names Talk! 28
2.3 Additional Leads from Language Processing 33
2.4 Lessons Learned from Joyce 37
vi Contents
3 Naming & Framing at Level 3: The Juliet Principle 40
3.1 The Multimodal Character of Level 3 Framings 40
3.2 An Illustration: High- versus Low-Budget Route
Framing of Brand and Product Names 43
3.2.1 Consuming the “Semiotic Cocktail” 45
3.2.2 Control versus Credibility and Effect 51
3.3 Names Negotiated 53
3.4 Is the Name Wrong or Is the World Going Wrong? 58
4 Naming & Framing at Level 4: The Lexical Toolbox
of Issues Management and Its Multimodal Surroundings 59
4.1 Beyond the Meaning of Individual Names 59
4.2 A Fractured Paradigm: Entman and Later
Developments 60
4.3 Understanding the Full Ecosystem of Naming &
Framing 62
4.4 Implications for Communicative Ethics and Fairness 65
4.5 Why Framing Works 67
4.5.1 Stereotype Thinking 68
4.5.2 Mental Shortcuts 69
4.5.3 A Quest for Situational Relevance 69
4.6 Is Fair (Strategic) Communication Possible? 75
5 Concluding Remarks 77
References 81
Index 105
Preface
My declared intention was to produce a concise book, at least for a
first edition, and so I did. This may strike some readers as odd, given
the title. Surely, the power that words exert over human minds must
have been a cardinal concern for an immense number of thinkers
and doers since the earliest days of humanity (let alone to artists,
though that is in many ways a distinct domain which, alas, can-
not be encompassed within the intended scope of this book). The
subject is thus bound to have been approached from a multitude
of theoretical and practical perspectives in support of a multitude
of endeavours from saving marriages, establishing group identities,
and substantiating legal claims to promoting commercial products
and legitimizing wars. Could all of that really be encompassed in
a single book, even a thicker one? Of course not, and that was not
the intention.
But there is another side of that coin. The lasting and versatile
attention to word power means that essential points, observations,
and analyses with a strong potential for complementing each other
remain scattered across a multitude of theoretical paradigms and
day-to-day human concerns with few natural touchpoints. In other
words, much of what could have been said to shed light on the sub-
ject as a whole has not yet been said, at least not in conjunction.
Still, during the latest years, certain new cross-disciplinary links
have been established with a potential for promoting further devel-
opments along these lines. This particularly applies to work pre-
sented under the heading of naming & framing (despite a so far
rather blurring understanding of the phrasing itself) and under the
agenda of multimodal communication research where words are
seen as merely one (yet important) part of the total mix of verbal
and nonverbal communicative resources that shape our world view.
My modest ambition with this book, then, is to take some aspects
of these lines of reasoning a step further by suggesting that the
viii Preface
power of words ultimately comes down to four different but con-
nected enterprises: giving things names, deciding on what name to
give them, further shaping people’s understanding of these names
through multimodal cotext, and selecting larger sets of names for
presenting a given subject matter in a particular light. To further
qualify this basic point, I draw on insights gained across a number
of areas of research and practice, some of which have not tradition-
ally been combined for the reasons just mentioned. At the same
time, I have taken utmost care not to go any deeper into any specif-
ics and technicalities of each of these fields than strictly required for
maintaining the overall argument. The opposite would pose an ob-
vious risk of losing (different) parts of the intended audience along
the way. If the overall idea is well received, a second edition might,
however, well leave room for extensions along several dimensions,
ideally by encompassing new results gained in future collaborative
cross-disciplinary work. However, at present, the major goal is to
prepare the ground for such possible next steps.
Copenhagen, November 2020, Viktor Smith
Acknowledgements
I am much indebted to a number of colleagues and collaborators at
Copenhagen Business School and far beyond (no one mentioned,
no one forgotten) for valuable comments and ideas as the work pro-
gressed and for paving the ground for it in earlier discussions and in
joint empirical work. Part of the latter was supported by the Danish
Council for Strategic Research and by the Independent Research
Fund Denmark. I owe special thanks to Per Durst-Andersen for get-
ting me to wonder about the power of words in the first place, and
for remaining a vital dialogue partner and friend ever since. On the
publishing side, I am deeply indebted to Series Editor Kay O’Hal-
loran, to Routledge Editor Elysse Preposi, and to two anonymous
reviewers, for gently helping me find the right cut for the final book,
and to Editorial Assistants Helena Parkinson and Mitchell Man-
ners and to Project Manager Karthikeyan Subramaniam for keep-
ing the publishing process on track. I am furthermore most grateful
to Niklas Antonson and to Daniel Barratt for creating and/or mod-
ifying key illustrations (and to Daniel for an inspiring dialogue
about other key issues as well). Likewise, I sincerely thank DHGate.
com, Cavi-Art, and Michel Naglin, owner of boutique Home-Créa
in Paris, for kindly allowing me to use their original visual mate-
rial. As for Michel, I am equally (perhaps more) delighted with our
inspiring discussions and exchanges of examples on the naming &
framing of round objects (and other things) in French versus English
as our email correspondence expanded. I am furthermore grateful
to Pixabay.com and to Wikimedia Commons for facilitating unre-
stricted sharing of visual content. Great thanks also to my recent
students in the BA course Multimodal Communication and the
MSc course Marketing Campaigns at Copenhagen Business School
for being a responsive and constructive test audience. Last but not
least, I owe the hugest thanks to my family (parents, wife, kids, and
our dog Sputnik), for bearing with me while I was immersed in the
manuscript and neglected lots of more important things.
Introduction
0.1 What’s in a Name – What’s in a Frame?
The power that words have to not only refer to objects and phenom-
ena in perceived reality but to make us aware of their presence and
shape our understanding of them has been recognized and exploited
by man since the earliest days of civilization (McWhorter, 2003;
Thomas, 1992; Wood, 1991; Mey, 1985). Yet, the implications are
possibly even more prominent in today’s increasingly information-
and communication-driven societies (Barton, 2016; Webster, 2014;
Graham, 2004). What would smartphones, fake news, hipsters,
Brexit, or Covid-19 be to us if they had not become known as…
precisely that? What makes some people prefer the name sex worker
to prostitute when referring to the same individuals? What qualifies
the word apple as a carrier of high expectations to IT devices? And
why do we find it easier to support a government that is defending its
citizens against terrorists (separatists, coupists) than a regime that is
oppressing its opposition (minorities, dissidents), regardless that the
words may well be applied to the same conflict by different inter-
ested parties? Understanding the mechanisms in play here seems
to be worthwhile for academic, social, political, commercial, and
ethical reasons.
However, the full array of mechanisms through which words ex-
ert their power over human minds has not as yet been subject to
a unified theoretical analysis. Several directions of research take
the study of words beyond pure linguistics (whether conceived in
a structural, generative, functional, or other sense) and address
the role that these entities (also) play in human cognition and so-
cial interaction. While a number of essential issues involving such
perspectives have thus been investigated in substantial depth, the
insights gained tend to remain isolated within disciplinary bound-
aries instead of being matched against each other to assess what
2 Introduction
each of them might contribute to a fuller understanding of the over-
all topic.
In the general linguistic, psychological, and philosophical
literature, for example, much attention has been devoted to such es-
sential sub-issues as the regularities underlying the formation and
comprehension of new words (Müller, Ohnheiser, Olsen, & Rainer,
2015; Aitchison, 2012; Schmid, 2011; Benczes, 2006b; Goldberg,
2006; Libben & Jarema, 2006; Štekauer, 2005; Devitt & Sterelny,
1999: 66–113), and possible connections between the word stock of
individual languages and the world views and styles of thinking of
their speakers (Harley, 2014: 51–103; Kone, 2013; Deutscher, 2010;
Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; Pinxten, 1976). However, the focus
tends to remain on a generic level, i.e. on what can be observed
for languages and their users viewed as monolithic entities. Less
attention has been devoted to the unique micro-choices that individ-
ual language users (journalists, politicians, marketing executives,
researchers, lawyers, bloggers, artists, and, ultimately, anybody)
make when selecting and/or creating particular words to support a
particular understanding of a given subject in preference to other
conceivable ones; see May (1985: 7–18) for a related argument.
By contrast, such systematic uses of words and language to
shape perceived reality have been dealt with in rhetoric since an-
tiquity (Kennedy, 2008; Carey, 1994). More recently, the issue has
furthermore gained substantial attention within and across several
branches of the social sciences and humanities spanning from po-
litical science to functional linguistics (Mautner, 2016; Fairhurst,
2011; Vliegenthar & van Zoonen, 2011; Chong & Druckman, 2007;
Fauconnier & Turner, 2003; Martin & White, 2003; Scheufele, 1999;
Entman, 1993; Tannen, 1993; Goffman, 1974). Characteristically,
these approaches tend to go beyond the individual word, focusing
on how choosing between different sets of words, phrases, and non-
verbal communicative means can be used for presenting a given
subject in different ways, from arms control to climate change. In
other words, the main attention tends to be devoted to what we
shall label Level 4 of naming & framing analyses in the following,
whereas Levels 1–3 are less systematically addressed.
Exceptions include the treatment of specific issues such as the per-
suasive use of conceptual blending and metaphor (Charteris-Black,
2011; Fauconnier & Lakoff, 2009; Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996) and
the contribution of the choice of words to supporting positive or
negative appraisals of the same situations and events (Martin &
White, 2003; Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001). Furthermore, the
Introduction 3
establishment of multimodal communication research as a distinct
field of inquiry has contributed to shedding new light at the decisive
role of nonverbal elements such as pictures, colours, shapes, and
physical action in the framing (also) of individual words and vice
versa (Powell, Boomgaarden, de Swert, & de Vreese, 2019; Meijers,
Remmelswaal & Wonneberger, 2018; Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Hallo-
ran, 2016; Jones, 2014).
The importance of choosing and/or creating “the right words” is
also widely recognized in a variety of more performance-oriented
disciplines. The list spans from journalism and media research
(Lecheler, Bos, & Vliegenthart, 2015; D’Angelo & Kuypers, 2010; Mat-
thes, 2009; McCombs, 1997), political communication (Schaffner &
Sellers, 2010; Bizer & Petty, 2005; Apthorpe & Gasper, 1996), and
public relations (Anderson, 2018, Luntz, 2007; Ledingham, 2003;
Hallahan, 1999; Grunig & Hunt, 1984) to marketing and branding
(Arora, Kalro, & Sharma, 2015; Riezebos, Kist, & Kootstra, 2003;
Collins, 1977), business communications (Darics & Koller, 2017;
Mautner, 2016), health promotion (Lynch & Zoller, 2015; Corcoran,
2013; Brown, 1995), legal argumentation (Rideout, 2008; Legrand,
1997a, b), and the management of professional terminologies (Kock-
aert & Steurs, 2015; Wright & Budin, 1997).1 However, with some es-
sential exceptions to be further addressed below, the emphasis tends
to be either on the wider strategic reasons for exercising the power of
words in the first place or on general persuasion and agenda-setting
strategies suited for supporting such goals (O’Keefe, 2016; Corcoran,
2013; McCombs, 1997). The words that ultimately come to fulfil the
strategic purposes, on the other hand, are often addressed in intu-
itive commonsense terms, relying on seemingly self-explanatory
examples such as those given in the beginning of this section; see
Mautner (2016: 1–6) for similar observations.
As we shall see shortly, however, the examples given earlier illus-
trate profoundly different reasons why and mechanisms through
which words can exert a power over human minds, and these
subtleties are not always clearly differentiated in the mainstream
literature of the various fields just mentioned.
Still, attempts have been made to subsume the phenomena of
interest, or some of them, under a common heading, in particular
1 The same applies to literature and the arts. However, this perspective entails
additional considerations on artistic genres, conventions, and styles which
would lead too far beyond the intended scope of the present book.
4 Introduction
that of naming & framing. This phrasing recurs in academic papers
(Charette, Hooker, & Stanton, 2015; Herzog, 2007; Hoeyer, 2005;
Brown, 1995), in practice-oriented recommendations (Mathews,
2016; Western States Center, 2003), and in the general debate
(Park, 2014), yet with great variation in scope and theoretical po-
sitioning. Moreover, while the words naming and framing taken
separately have several (even if diverse) established definitions,
this is not the case with the present word combination which au-
thors tend to treat as self-explanatory (as has been argued also
for the specific communication-theoretical sense(s) of framing; see
Entman, 1993: 52).
0.2 Aims and Scope
Against this background, the present book aims at taking the
matter a step further by suggesting a hierarchy of four distinct yet
tightly interwoven procedures and corresponding levels (or layers)
of analysis that can be described as manifestations of naming &
framing operations.
All of them have been addressed under these headings earlier,
but rarely viewed in integration. Likewise, several other frame-
works take a multi-layered approach to analysing words and their
meanings in also addressing other levels of language structure (pho-
netics, syntax, text) and conceptual and contextual information
presented by verbal and nonverbal means. Examples include, but
are not exhausted by, the mapping of overarching functional pat-
terns across linguistic forms in construction grammar (Goldberg,
2006; Fillmore, Kay, & O’Connor, 1988), theorizing on the inter-
face between (code-based) semantics and (situational) pragmatics
(Ariel, 2010; Zlatev, Smith, van de Weijer, & Skydsgaard, 2010;
Verschueren, 1998) and between visual and verbal representations
of composite communicative content (Forceville, 2014; Messaris,
1997), along with several frameworks supporting more practice-
oriented enterprises from foreign language learning and teaching
(Graves, August, & Mancilla-Martinez, 2013; Prince, 2006) to com-
mercial product development and naming (Özcan & Egmond, 2012;
Moskowitz, Reisner, Itty, Katz, & Krieger, 2006). What the present
work might contribute to the general picture, then, is establishing a
direct connection between some of the perspectives just mentioned,
and others, and the quest set up initially: to yield a better under-
standing of the totality of mechanisms through which words exert
their power over human minds.
Introduction 5
In the existing literature, this perspective is most aptly captured
by the intuitively appealing but so far vaguely defined notion of
naming & framing as introduced in Section 0.1. We will continue the
inquiry along that path, incorporating and expanding upon well-
known core senses of the English words. The word naming will be
used for referring to either creating a word for something (i.e. giving
it a name) or selecting a well-known word among existing alterna-
tives for referring to something (i.e. calling it by a certain name), a
distinction that is not always made explicit in the existing literature.
The word framing, in turn, will refer to the circumstance that some-
thing influences and delimits the understanding of something else
in a particular direction. As we shall soon see, this is an apt descrip-
tion of more than one level of sense-making involving naming (see
Table 0.1 and Figure 0.1) below.
Before proceeding, a few additional clarifications of terminology
are required. The linguistic units that people use for naming things
in either of the two senses mentioned will in their capacity as such
also be referred to as words, apart from such instances where the
more technical term lexical expression(-unit) has its justification.
The latter is the case where it is essential to allow for the existence
of orthographically and/or phonetically separate words that nev-
ertheless function as “one word,” i.e. as an indivisible whole the
meaning of which goes beyond the meaning of its parts, e.g. home
banking, deep state, Bank of America. Moreover, the term makes
it possible to distinguish the sequence of sounds or letters as such
from the meaning attached to it, whereas the word word is ambig-
uous in that respect; take the statements “the word nerd consists
of 4 letters” versus “the word nerd sounds rather impolite.” This is
essential when the processes behind the very establishment of such
a permanent link between expression and content are of primary
interest. Finally, when words are referred to in their capacity as
tools for naming something (in either of the two senses indicated),
they are also labelled names. For the present purpose, the term cov-
ers both proper names (denoting individual objects such as Donald
Trump or the Eiffel Tower) and general names (denoting categories
of objects such as Republican politician or tourist attraction), not-
withstanding that the word name is often reserved for the former
purpose in everyday speech.
The distinctions made so far are all well-known and (relatively)
uncontroversial, whereas the distinction between four levels of
naming & framing is not and will be subject to further explana-
tion and discussion in the following chapters. Table 0.1 gives a first
6 Introduction
overview of the four levels (or layers) of naming & framing sug-
gested. The example sleep hygiene is repeated for all four levels to
clarify the mutual connection between them. The same key points
are rendered in visual form in Figure 0.1. To simplify things, the
objects or phenomena to which the names in question are applied
are referred to as “it.”
It should be stressed from the outset that the four levels pro-
posed do not per se pertain to different sorts of names but to
different perspectives from which they can be viewed. What is
said under Level 1 thus applies to any name by virtue of its very
existence, while an agreement on its collectively adopted mean-
ing ultimately depends on the factors mentioned under Level 3.
If the expression-unit in question is not arbitrary to begin with,
i.e. has a built-in sematic potential in its own right, the factors
mentioned under Level 2 will function as a mediating link in the
above-mentioned process with a potential for influencing its out-
come in essential respects. Level 4, then, extends the perspective
from single names (with all three perspectives potentially appli-
cable to them) to larger sets of names selected to present a wider
issue in a certain light in running communication. This, in turn,
will feed contextual cues back to Level 3 with an impact also for
the understanding of individual names, as potentially mediated
by Level 2, and thereby affect the cognitive implications of the
very existence of these names at Level 1.
Figure 0.1 Four levels of naming & framing visualized.
Introduction 7
Table 0.1 Four levels of naming & framing
Level 1 Framing of “it” as a potential object of human thinking and
communication by virtue of the very fact of providing it with a
dedicated name. Examples: sleep hygiene, global warming, blogger,
Brexit, nerd (as opposed to no name).
Level 2 Additional framing of “it” emerging from the composition and/
or origin of the expression-unit chosen for the purpose which may
emphasize some properties of “it” at the expense of others. Examples:
sleep hygiene (presenting “it” as a kind of hygiene), global warming
(which explains the nature of “it,” but not why many people see it as
a threat), worm (in the specific IT sense highlighting the similarities
between a kind of computer malware and living worms), sex worker
(which suggests a higher degree of societal legitimacy than prostitute),
Whopper (which sounds like something big and mighty).
Level 3 Framing of the name itself by other words, sentences,
and nonverbal perceptual cues surrounding it in running
communication (including people’s first-hand experiences with
whatever it denotes) which further contribute to shaping its
generally agreed meaning. Examples: the communicative processes
and first-hand experiences that shaped the current understanding
of sleep hygiene as a distinct medical field, of global warming as a
major environmental concern, and of Apple as a carrier of high
expectations to IT devices.
Level 4 Framing of a wider subject matter (constituting “it” in a wider,
thematic sense) by referring to key aspects of it by means of different
(in themselves often well-known) names and whole sets of names.
Examples: the contribution of the names sleep hygiene, sleep cycle,
bedtime routines, powernap, etc. to a particular understanding of
the wider subject of sleeping problems and how to deal with them;
the contribution of the names global warming, greenhouse effect,
CO2 footprint, climate refugees, etc., to global concerns about the
wider subject of climate change; the different implications of the
statements “the rebels fought courageously against the authoritarian
regime” and “the government troops were ambushed by radicalized
terrorists” (as applied to the same events by different stakeholders).
Note
Levels 1–3 all relate to naming in the sense of ‘giving something a name.’ However, while
the question at Level 1 is whether something has been given a name, the question at Level
2 is how it has been named, and the question at Level 3 is how surrounding contextual cues
shape the full communicative potential of the name. By contrast, Level 4 relates to nam-
ing in the sense of ‘calling something by a certain name’ (or whole sets of names), thereby
affecting people’s understanding of whatever is talked about without necessarily creating
new names for that purpose. In turn, all four procedures may be described as instances of
framing in the sense of ‘influencing and delimiting the understanding of something else.’
The essential difference lies in what is framed by what at the respective levels, a differen-
tiation which is often lacking in the existing naming & framing literature.
8 Introduction
In the following, the framework and its applicability to real-life
naming & framing processes will be taken further and matched
against existing theoretical paradigms and empirical findings con-
tributing different pieces to the overall puzzle.
0.3 Cross-Disciplinary Positioning
The approach is cross-disciplinary by the very nature of the matter,
as it follows from the literature review given earlier. As such, it con-
tinues the agenda proposed by Entman (1993) in his much-quoted
seminal study of (what we here call) naming & framing at Level
4, namely “bringing together insights and theories that would
otherwise remain scattered in other disciplines” (1993: 51). Com-
pleting the analysis with a more detailed treatment of Levels 1–3,
in turn, presupposes that “language is not treated in isolation (e.g.
as a ‘module’), but both as based on structures and processes of
general cognition and social cognition and as affecting such struc-
tures and processes” (Scandinavian Association for Language and
Cognition, cf. SALC, 2019). This further entails a dynamic interpre-
tation of the classic Saussurean distinction between “langue” and
“parole” (Saussure, 2011 [1916]), i.e. between human language(s)
understood as an intersubjectively agreed code and individual peo-
ple’s concrete communicative interaction based on that code. What
should never be left out of sight is that the code itself, including a
shared vocabulary, is generated and continuously adjusted through
the communicative efforts of concrete individuals in concrete situ-
ations pursuing concrete communicative goals, and that they may
sometimes change or add new elements to the code in that process.
The latter insight has been articulated from a variety of
paradigm-specific perspectives in language philosophy (taking both
mentalist and radical realist shapes, e.g. Armstrong, 2016; Devitt &
Sterelny, 1999: 66–113; Mulligan, 1990; Leopold, 1929), language
psychology (Harley, 2014: 51–103; Cohen, 1986; Hörmann, 1986;
1981), cognitive pragmatics (Ariel, 2010; Zlatev et al., 2010; Mey,
1985), and social semiotics (Böck & Pashler, 2013; Kress, 2010,
1993). However, the point tends to erode in day-to-day research
practices which are characterized by a rather strict division
of labour between system-oriented and processing-oriented
approaches to the lexicon and to language research in general
(see Hörmann, 1986, for a critical account that largely remains
valid today). Given that naming & framing lies at the very crux
Introduction 9
of these matters, the following account will naturally contrib-
ute to the discussion in certain respects, one example being the
links established between experimental research into people’s
real-time decoding and acquisition of familiar and unfamiliar
composite names (see Sections 2.3 and 3.2.1) and the theoretical
debates on the status of lexical non-arbitrariness (motivation) in
language viewed as a conventionalized code (see Sections 2.1 and
2.2), as mediated by theorizing on the situated nature of human
categorization (see Section 1.3.2). Such complementary perspec-
tives sometimes do co-occur in more general treatments of the
lexicon (Aitchison, 2012; Benczes, 2006), yet there seems to be an
unexploited potential for combining them at the operational level
when pursuing specific research goals relating to naming, fram-
ing, and multimodality (see Sections 2.4 and 3.2.1).
Last but not least, the present focus on naming, and hence words
and language, does not exclude but, on the contrary, requires con-
sideration of the role played by other potential carriers of commu-
nicative content, also referred to as semiotic modalities: pictures,
colours, shapes, physical interaction, and so on. In most communi-
cative settings and the communicative products that emerge from
them (news articles, homepages, advertisements, films, university
lectures, product packaging, and so on), words are surrounded by
elaborate symphonies or “cocktails” of other semiotic resources
which demonstrably influence the communicative effect exerted by
the words, while the choice of words influences the interpretation
of the surrounding nonverbal elements (cf. Powell et al., 2019; Jewitt
et al., 2016; Smith, Barratt, & Zlatev, 2014; Kress, 2010; Kress &
van Leeuwen, 2001). As Kress (2010: 1) aptly sums up the situation,
“image shows what takes too long to read, and writing names what
would be difficult to show. Colour is used to highlight specific aspects
of the overall message.” On that background, care has been taken
to avoid what Jones (2014: 3) labels a “language-centric” view of
goal-driven communication while at the same time accommodat-
ing the specifics that words demonstrably do display as elements of
the total multimodal mix. The multimodal dimension will be taken
up again in Sections 1.2.1 and 2.3 and taken substantially further
from Section 3.1 onwards.
As regards the application of the proposed framework to con-
crete communicative domains and challenges, it should be clear
by now that this is not a book about family relations, foreign pol-
itics, marketing, health care, food labelling, climate change, or
10 Introduction
any other particular area of human activity where exercising the
power of words is a decisive factor. Rather, it aims at completing the
toolbox of researchers and practitioners investigating or engaging
in naming & framing processes across a variety of real-life domains
while selectively addressing some of them for illustration.
1 Naming & Framing
at Level 1
Having a Name for It
1.1 Naming Something Is Having It, but Who’s
to Decide?
“If you don’t have a name for something, then as far as peo-
ple are concerned, you don’t have it at all,” states Kevin Tracey
in a promotion video for the services of Tracey Communications
(Massachusetts, USA).1 Tracey attributes the point to the semio-
tician Marshall Blonsky, but it echoes a relatively broad consen-
sus among language theorists the wider implications of which are
however eagerly debated as we shall soon see.
Certainly, real-life support for such a claim appears to be avail-
able in abundance. It is hard to imagine HIV and AIDS hitting
the headlines in the 1980s and becoming the subject of debates,
information campaigns, support lines, charity work, and political
decision-making, before these phenomena had not only been iden-
tified and described, but also unambiguously named (Emke, 2000;
Berridge, 1996; Colby & Cook, 1991). The drastic developments
presently evolving around the name Covid-19 still remain to be fully
comprehended and recorded in these respects. In turn, this is what
is now happening with the sequence of events known as Brexit, a
term that gave supporters and opponents of such a political deci-
sion in the UK a more tangible target for their campaigning than
would a formal phrase like “United Kingdom invocation of Article
50 of the Treaty on European Union.” Arguably, the name also
came to underpin a less technical conceptualization of the whole
matter in the wider British public, leaving essential consequences
unattended till later (Smith, 2017; Walsh, 2017).
Another group of examples are what some marketers and prod-
uct developers term “really new products,” i.e. innovations which
1 https://traceycommunications.com/?p=579 (accesses June 2020).
12 Naming & Framing at Level 1
require severe conceptual reorganizations in the minds of consum-
ers to be understood and accepted or rejected (Nielsen, Escalas,
& Hoeffler, 2018; Charette, Hooker, & Stanton, 2015; Alexander,
Lynch, & Wang, 2008; Hoeffler, 2003; Song & Montoya-Weiss, 1998;
see also Rogers, 2010 on the acceptance of new social practices and
services). A good example are the compact electronic devices that
combine the properties of a mobile phone with those of a laptop,
a TV set, a camera, a music player, a GPS, and much else (Park &
Chen, 2007; for related examples, see Gattol, Sääksjärvi, Gill, &
Schoormans, 2016). Agreeing on “a name for it” here became a
vital step towards catching consumers’ attention, facilitating their
understanding of the innovation, and ultimately increasing de-
mands, as accomplished in this case by the name smartphone (and
tablet for larger variants with somewhat different advantages and
drawbacks).
At the same time, new names are not always created for labelling
entirely new phenomena. They may also categorize and present
things that have been around us all along in a new way. For exam-
ple, people who qualify as nerds in present-day English (and e.g.
in Danish, Swedish, German, and Russian, with some variations
of spelling and pronunciation) are likely to have existed and dis-
played certain distinct personal characteristics even before that
name was invented (otherwise, why invent it?). Likewise, (some)
men have surely been explaining complicated matters to women in
a patronizing fashion, and many of us have experienced the feel-
ing of being hungry and increasingly angry at the same time before
these phenomena were labelled mansplaining and hangry in English
and the words included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED,
2018). Moreover, whether something qualifies to have a name or not
may in itself be subject to debate. For example, the term premen-
strual syndrome (PMS) which dates back to the 1930s has still not
been accepted as a valid diagnosis for a distinct medical disorder by
many physicians and female citizens (Figert, 2017; Rodin, 1992; see
Brown, 1995 on other diagnosis names).
As the examples illustrate, some new names hint at what they are
supposed to mean by virtue of their composition and/or origin (e.g.
mansplaining) while others do not (e.g. nerd), which does, however,
not make the latter names less comprehensible. The very fact of “hav-
ing a name for it” thus makes a tremendous difference which is the
key point pursued in this chapter. The additional flavour potentially
added by the expression-unit chosen for the purpose will be further
explored in Chapter 2 (leading us to naming & framing at Level 2).
Naming & Framing at Level 1 13
At this point, another question imposes itself: Are there no limits
to what can potentially be provided with a dedicated name? The
question is particularly prominent for general names denoting cat-
egories of things such as fake news, nerds, or smartphones in that a
number of people must agree on identifying these entities by more
or less similar criteria and calling them by the same name to en-
sure successful communication. The case is somewhat different for
proper names in that everyone is, in principle, entitled to name their
cat or bicycle whatever they like and others will usually recognize
and go along with that decision (for an illustrative, though polemical,
discussion of the social interaction involved, see Devitt & Sterelny,
1999: 66–82). An intermediate case is posed by brand names like
Apple and single-referent names like Brexit which have certain
traits in common with proper names (i.e. the fixed referents), but
nevertheless presuppose the existence of a generalized intersubjec-
tive content to fulfil their purpose (see e.g. Kaufmann, Loureiro, &
Manarioti, 2016; Thomson & Crocker, 2015; Maurya & Mishra,
2012). These specifics will concern us in due course. For now, the
overall question is whether everybody can modify the vocabulary
of their native language as they see fit, considering that language is
a collective construct usually shared by a large body of individuals.
The question echoes a longstanding theoretical debate, or rather
two closely connected ones: the opposition between linguistic
universalism and linguistic relativism on the one hand, and that
between a static and a dynamic understanding of human catego-
rization and its manifestations in language on the other. We will
consider them in turn.
1.2 What Language(s) May and Must
According to the universalist view (for some variants and critical
discussion, see Pavlenko, 2014; Regier, Kay, Gilbert, & Ivry, 2010;
Pinker, 1994; Pinxten, 1976; Fodor, 1975), different languages may
well have different lexical and grammatical means for referring to
perceived reality, but given that all languages ultimately build upon
the same basic cognitive structures, such means can be combined
and adapted to express any content required in any language. The
opposite view, known as linguistic relativism, ultimately dates back
at least to the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel (BibleGateway,
2011: 11, 1–9); for more recent formulations, see e.g. Bentsen (2018);
Durst-Andersen (2011); Deutscher (2010); von Humboldt, 1999
[1836]; Wierzbicka (1997); Baldinger (1980); Whorf (1956). The basic
14 Naming & Framing at Level 1
argument is that the world’s languages not only reflect, but shape
and maintain the way their users understand the world so that each
language comes to encapsulate a unique worldview that cannot be
transposed to any other language in a 1:1 fashion or altered by its
speakers by any short-term measures. The state as such is referred
to as linguistic relativity.
For many years, the debates centred around fundamental the-
oretical positions rather than in-depth analyses of larger portions
of linguistic data, relying on isolated (and disputed) examples
such as Eskimo languages allegedly having more than 100 words
for snow (usually relying on Boas, 1911: 25–26, who however only
mentions four) or Hopi Indians having no expressions for time
(Whorf, 1956: 57). However, during the last 3–4 decades, more sys-
tematic investigations targeting a larger number of languages and
semantic domains have been conducted, uncovering a number of
generalizable typological differences which divide even closely re-
lated languages such as the Indo-European. Focus areas include the
lexical and/or grammatical means available for referring to space
and motion, different types of physical objects, colours, numbers,
cultural stereotypes, and others (Koster & Cadierno, 2018; Groh,
2016; Korzen, 2016; Durst-Andersen, 2011; Tse & Altarriba, 2008;
Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000: 23–146; Wierzbicka, 1997; Hardin &
Maffi, 1997; Berlin & Kay, 1969).
Moreover, it has been suggested that some of the general trends
observed correlate with certain cultural and structural specifics of
the societies in which the languages are spoken. This reasoning has
been applied to areas as diverse as the divide between common-law
and civil-law legal thinking (Legrand, 1997a, b) and the precise
understanding of society-bound notions such as freedom and
friendship (Wierzbicka, 1997). It has furthermore been assessed
on experimental grounds whether language-typological differ-
ences influence the performance of the native speakers of different
languages on tasks that go beyond expressing a given content
through language such as natural-scene perception and recall and
categorization of events in film clips or crime accounts (Rojo &
Cifuentes-Férez, 2017; Berthele & Stocker, 2016; Malt, Gennari, &
Imai, 2010; Papafragou, Massey, & Gleitman, 2002). The results are
not unequivocal, but they do seem to provide support for the over-
all idea in certain respects.
All of this has led some authors to propose a “weak” version of
linguistic relativism, arguing that while language structure alone
cannot determine people’s worldview in every respect, it may still
Naming & Framing at Level 1 15
direct their attention to different aspects of otherwise comparable
objects and phenomena, especially when it comes to putting their
thoughts into words, i.e. “thinking for speaking” (Slobin, 1996; see
also Kone, 2013; Deutscher, 2010; Gumperz & Levinson, 1996).
Virtually the same point was anticipated years earlier by Jakob-
son in the following subtle passage: “Languages differ essentially
in what they must convey, not in what they may convey” (1959: 236).
To take a simple example: The English word ball corresponds to
two words in French, namely balle or ballon, depending on the ob-
ject’s size. This is in line with the more general observation that
the Romance languages (here: French) tend to have a more varied
core vocabulary for human artefacts, differentiating them by their
immediate visual appearance, whereas the Germanic languages
(here: English) tend to operate with fewer basic nouns (word roots)
labelling the objects in accordance with their functional proper-
ties (e.g. the ability to roll). Another example would be the Danish
word kande (≈ ‘jug’) which corresponds to brocca, bricco, caraffa,
annaffiatoio, and more in Italian depending on materials and shape
(for further examples and discussion, see Korzen, 2006; Herslund &
Baron, 2003; Legrand, 1997b: 56–57).
However, such tendencies do not prevent English and French
speakers from giving dedicated names to whatever subtypes of
(what is in English called) balls they see as sufficiently commu-
nicatively and cognitively important, e.g. by creating composite
names such as the English tennis ball and basketball (ball) and
correspondingly balle de tennis and ballon de basket in French (i.e.
secondary lexicalizations based on re-use of the primary lexicaliza-
tions available in the language in question, cf. Smith, 2000). Only,
the different starting points in terms of relevant head noun mean
that the French names come to explicitly stress the difference in size
which the English do not.
Certainly, few English speakers would probably need to have
that information spelled out for them in the first place. Yet, a risk
of miscommunication may nevertheless occur, for instance, if an
English native speaker only superficially familiar with French en-
counters less typical combinations such as ballon de tennis and balle
de basket – say, when used ad hoc for referring to an oversized ten-
nis ball suitable as a dog toy and a miniature basketball intended
for decoration; see Figure 1.1a and b.
Without having access to multimodal contexts such as those
shown in Figure 1.1a and b that combine both visual and verbal
cues, the English speaker would be unlikely to get the twist, and
16 Naming & Framing at Level 1
Figure 1.1 N on-typical uses of the French words balle and ballon in
composite names denoting non-typical referents in terms of
size, as found in e-store product descriptions. (a) The name
ballon de tennis referring to an oversized tennis ball in DHGate.
com. (b) The name balle de basked referring to a miniature
basketball in Home-Créa.
explaining it would require more words in English than in French.
Notably, while example b is taken from an original French home-
page,2 example a is taken from the homepage of a Chinese-owned
2 https://homecrea.eproshopping.fr/ (accessed June 2020).
Naming & Framing at Level 1 17
e-commerce company offering its goods and services across a vast
number of countries and languages,3 which means that the French
wording is most likely the result of a (in this case contextually ade-
quate) creative translation.
In other cases, the content encoded a priori into the lexical
building blocks available in a given language may, however, be the
cause of severe miscommunication when content originally artic-
ulated in one language is transposed into another language. This
has, for instance, been demonstrated for numeric and colour terms
used for reproducing foreign product and brand names in Manda-
rin Chinese due to the formal, semantic, and cultural specifics of
these word elements (Chang & Lii, 2008; Chan & Huang, 2001; Ang,
1997); for further discussion and examples of some unfortunate
cross-linguistic transpositions, see Section 2.4. Even so, a suitable
name can usually be found.
In sum, the historically developed idiosyncrasies of any given
language may indeed exert a certain influence on what qualifies to
have a name a priori, and on which features are foregrounded by
the name. But language users in all societies still adapt their lexi-
con in accordance with their current cognitive and communicative
needs which are determined by many other factors than such long-
term language-internal influences; these are further discussed in
Chapters 3 and 4. Language-internal factors may nevertheless
still exert some influence on what the resultant names come to
“say” literally (i.e. on naming & framing at Level 2, see Table 0.1
and Chapter 2); yet, factors such as spontaneous creativity, situa-
tional adequacy, personal preferences, and sometimes conscious
strategic and persuasive considerations seem to play an equally
important role here. For example, the composition of English
names such as sex worker and crowd funding hardly comes down to
the language-typological characteristics of English alone (though
the choice of a noun-noun compound rather than, say, a derivation
or a phrasal lexeme which is more frequent in other languages than
English probably does). In any case, communicators do wisely in
working with rather than against the typological preferences of the
language(s) in which they operate, while bearing in mind that this
is not the only factor that determines the acceptance and success
of a lexical innovation.
3 https://www.dhgate.com/ (accessed June 2020).
18 Naming & Framing at Level 1
1.3 From ad-hoc Categories to First Candidates
for Naming
Returning to what can successfully be provided with a dedicated
name, the main precondition thus still seems to be that at least some
people apart from the person who invented the name experience a
cognitive and communicative need for it and that they can agree
more or less on what the name means. How does such a consensus
come about?
As indicated in Section 0.3, the present book takes a cognitivist
approach to human language in seeing it as both based on and af-
fecting other kinds of cognitive functions. The latter includes the
(evolutionarily more ancient) function of categorization, i.e. the
ability to distinguish entities of one kind from entities of all other
kinds by applying criteria that go beyond pure instinct. Advanced
animals also have that ability in that, say, a dog (on a good day)
is able to distinguish its toys from its owner’s shoes and (most
certainly) activities that it likes to engage in from those it resents
(though the wider theoretical implications of such observations
are subject to eager debate, see e.g. Smith, Zakrzewski, Johnson,
Valleau, & Church, 2016; Newen & Bartels, 2007; Tomasello, 2003).
Still, humans take this capability substantially further in distin-
guishing (more or less) clearly between smartphones and dumb-
phones, assistant professors and associate professors, blind dates
and job interviews, and so on. Moreover, they may assign a single
name to all members of each such category instead of naming them
individually, thereby enabling generalized verbal communication
about them and fixing them in their collective memory.
In line with the predominant view in cognitively oriented
language theory (Ramscar & Port, 2015; Geeraerts, 2010; Evans &
Green, 2006; Jackendoff, 1990; Lakoff, 1987; Wierzbicka, 1985),
we classify the mental entities that support such categorizations
as concepts which could be described as “mental checklists” that
comprise the totality of criteria that people use for singling out and
qualifying whatever they need to categorize. Notably, the cognitive
function of concepts is not restricted to supporting language-based
communication – it is just as crucial for nonverbalized thinking and
acting. For example, one may notice that an extra chair is needed in
a crowded meeting room, and one may go out and fetch one from
a neighbouring office (and not necessarily one that looks exactly
like the ones in the meeting room, as long as you can sit on it), with-
out hearing or saying the word chair at any point. However, if a
Naming & Framing at Level 1 19
category becomes sufficiently important to a sufficient number of
people, the corresponding concept may ultimately be provided with
an intersubjectively accepted unit of permanent lexical expression,
i.e. lexicalized, and hence (also) be enrolled into the language that
these people speak, in which capacity it is said to function as the
meaning of the corresponding expression-unit.4 We will return to
the establishment of this link shortly. First, we need to take a closer
look at the internal structure of human concepts and how it can be
modelled.
1.3.1 The Anatomy of Human Concepts
Rather than describing concepts as linear arrays of mutually inde-
pendent criteria (components, features, markers, predicates, etc.)
as is commonplace in many pre-cognitive linguistic and philosoph-
ical accounts, they are here understood as complex graded struc-
tures that reflect the subjectivity and fuzzy boundaries of human
categorization (Murphy, 2010; Barsalou, 1987; Lakoff, 1987). These
criteria (components) may be subdivided into:
a essential components which correspond to properties that any
entity must possess in order to be accepted as belonging to the
category in question, e.g. our expectation that a smartphone
must be able to go online;
b prototypical components which correspond to properties that
are a central part of our understanding of the category as a
whole, but must not necessarily apply to every particular ex-
emplar, e.g. our expectation that smartphones mostly have
touchscreens, though some may have buttons, or that they are
usually more expensive than dumbphones.
4 At least, such a 1:1 identification of cognitive and linguistic variables is feasible
for the meaning of nouns which denote “things” in the widest sense the identi-
fication and categorization of which appear to be pivotal on both the cognitive
and the linguistic levels. The case is somewhat more complex for verbs which
lexicalize (generalized mental models of) situations the various elements of
which may be conflated differently by the default lexicalization patterns found
in different languages – take walk/drive/fly/sail out in English versus sortir in
French. Specifying the manner of motion is thus optional in the latter case,
which, on the other hand, does not exclude that it may be specified if so wished
by additional lexical means. For further details and theoretical implications,
see Durst-Andersen, Smith, & Thomsen (2013); Slobin (2004); Herslund &
Baron (2003); Talmy (2000).
20 Naming & Framing at Level 1
For components at both levels, an additional distinction5 can be
made between:
a sensory components which rely on immediate recall of first-
order sensory experiences, e.g. the experience of seeing, touch-
ing, and using a genuine smartphone;
b propositional components which involve factual second-order
knowledge potentially susceptible to truth-conditional eval-
uation, e.g. knowing that smartphones must contain a central
processing unit (CPU) and analogue-digital and digital-analogue
(AD and DA) converters in order to operate. We will return to
the essential circumstance that many users of smartphones lack
the latter kind of knowledge in Section 3.3.
Figure 1.2 C
omponential analysis of the concept conveyed by the name
smartphone.
5 Another way of capturing the same key point is to describe human concepts a
synthesis of an “image” and an “idea” which mutually presuppose each other
and together make up an image-idea pair (Durst-Andersen, 2011: 132–144).
Naming & Framing at Level 1 21
The key distinctions introduced earlier are summarized in
Figure 1.2. More details on the grey-toned elements follow in Section
3.3. For additional details on the theorizing, evidence, and debates
underlying the present account (and some of the theoretical and
terminological variations bridged by it), see Barsalou (2016; 1987);
Murphy (2010, 2004); Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers (2007); Geer-
aerts (2006); Wierzbicka (1985); Rosch (1975); Smith, Shoben, &
Rips (1974); Zadeh (1965).
1.3.2 A Dynamic Approach to Human Categorization
Most classic accounts of human categorization tacitly assume
that concepts are static entities that are permanently present in
the mind of anyone who “has” the concept in question. Moreover,
the very identification and delimitation of concepts is often linked
with the existence of “a word for them,” thereby rendering the dis-
tinction between concepts and meanings somewhat tautological,
despite claims to the contrary; the strong formulation of linguis-
tic relativism mentioned earlier is but one example of this (for a
more critical discussion, see e.g. Ramscar & Port, 2015; Zlatev &
Blomberg, 2015; Malt & Wolff, 2010). However, this reasoning has
been increasingly challenged, most consistently by Barsalou (2016,
2010, 2003, 1995, 1987, 1983; see also Wyer & Srull, 2014; Kiefer &
Barsalou, 2013; Murphy, 2010; Wilson & Carston, 2007; Kurtz &
Gentner, 2001).
In an early work, Barsalou summarizes his point as follows:
“Rather than being retrieved as static units from memory to repre-
sent categories, concepts originate in a highly flexible process that
retrieves generic and episodic information from long-term memory
to construct temporary concepts in working memory” (1987: 101).
Stated differently, whenever we need to distinguish something from
something else, while also qualifying it in various respects, we draw
on the total pool of knowledge and experiences available to us and
retrieve the set of criteria (components) needed for the purpose.
The analysis extends both to:
a categories established for sheer ad-hoc purposes such as
distinguishing things that one needs to take on an upcoming
camping trip from things that one does not (necessarily) need
to take, or food products that are compatible with one’s low-
carb diet from products that are not (or less) compatible, and
b categories that are (re)identified on a regular basis by a larger
number of individuals because they repeatedly turn out to be
22 Naming & Framing at Level 1
crucial to their interaction with their environment (e.g. friends,
smartphones, chairs, and faculty meetings).
Importantly, the concepts that support the respective categori-
zations appear to be structured according to same basic patterns
in both cases (as shown in Figure 1.2). Thus, a similar analy-
sis could be applied to the camping-trip and the low-carb-diet
examples.
However, there is a marked difference when it comes to means of
linguistic expression. While concepts for ad-hoc categories usually
have to be conveyed by longer paraphrases such as “things I need
for my camping trip” (or possibly idiosyncratic ad-hoc names such
as my camping stuff ), concepts for more stable categories will proto-
typically have been provided with a permanent lexical expression,
i.e. lexicalized. We will here refer to the latter entities as salient con-
cepts (see also e.g. Liu, Chin, & Ng, 2003), while Barsalou primarily
speaks of concepts for permanent categories while stressing the es-
sential reservations to “permanent” just explained. Some concepts
will be salient with most people on earth, others will be restricted
to particular societies and/or cultures, and yet others to specific
subgroups within and across them. For example, Thanksgiving din-
ner lexicalizes a concept which is salient with most US Americans
but relatively few people outside the USA, whereas water hammer
lexicalizes a concept which is salient with plumbers and water engi-
neers across the globe but not too many other people (for technical
details, see e.g. Ghidaoui, Zhao, McInnis, & Axworthy, 2005), as
also expressed by trykstød (lit. ≈ ‘pressure push’) in Danish, coup de
belier (lit. ≈ ‘ram’s stroke’) in French, and гидроудар (lit. ≈ ‘hydro
blow’) in Russian.
The different ways in which the latter names present (frame)
the concept in question relate to naming & framing at Level 2,
as further discussed in Sections 2.1–2.4. What should be noted
here, however, is that the concept must necessarily have grown sa-
lient with the relevant groups of people even before the respective
names were created (otherwise, why create them?) which, in turn,
entails that many essential and prototypical conceptual compo-
nents will remain the same across all “local versions” of the con-
cept, quite independently of the names chosen. Another way of
stating this point (following Smith, 2000) is that the what-aspect
of lexicalization needs to be distinguished from the how-aspect of
lexicalization, but that the former at the same time cannot simply
be reduced to a naïve realist idea of the referents already “being
Naming & Framing at Level 1 23
out there” and language merely providing labels for them (for a
critical overview of some lines of theorizing largely following the
latter path, see Devitt & Sterelny, 1999: 83–113).6 As the examples
illustrate, the situation is usually more complex than that: First,
“it” must be crystallized cognitively which is already a non-trivial
task, then a name must be provided and in some cases the name
collectively agreed on may add some shades to the semantics of
its own.
Importantly, none of this excludes that potential candidates
for receiving a name may already be “out there” independently of
human cognition, not least in the case of so-called natural kinds
for which it can be argued that they fall under a particular cate-
gory by virtue of certain nature-given properties, e.g. water, ba-
nanas, cats, dogs, earthquakes, and red blood cells (though some
proponents of social constructivism may well disagree and/or re-
ject the question as irrelevant; see Roberts-Miller, 2002 for further
discussion). Rather, the point is that it takes a human mind (and
brain) and a shared language to (try to) identify such entities and
communicate about them. For example, it is hard to imagine that
red blood cells or Alzheimer’s disease could be subsumed under
well-delimited categories and referred to by precise names in the
year of 1659, even if the phenomena denoted by these terms today
6 Devitt & Sterelny (1999: 83–113) offer an illustrative yet (self-)critical account of
so-called causal theories of reference which rely extensively on ostensive defini-
tions, i.e. on the assumption that tangible objects such as cats or gold have orig-
inally been physically pointed out and named by some “dubber” and that others
have borrowed that reference by observing the use of the name in similar situa-
tions. The declared meta-theoretical goal, at least in earlier formulations of this
approach, was to eliminate the need for referring to concepts, thoughts, and
other “troublesome” cognitive variables to explain word meaning. However, de-
spite its clear virtues in highlighting the pivotal role of immediate sensory cues
in word acquisition (see also Sections 2.3 and 3.1), the argument leaves several
other key questions unanswered as captured by the examples red blood cells and
Alzheimer’s disease in the main text. This too is readily recognized and vividly
illustrated by the present authors, yet without pointing out any preferable alter-
natives. However, both the causal paradigm and the closely related approach
of Putnam (1975a) addressed in Section 3.3 are open to cognitive (re)interpreta-
tions on their own terms (as shown also by e.g. Keil, Stein, Webb, Billings, &
Rozenblit, 2008; Geeraerts, 2006; Durst-Andersen, 1992; Lakoff, 1987) and in
that case they add essential new shades to our understanding of the role of in-
terpersonal interaction in the genesis of conventionalized word meaning(s). One
essential implication of this is taken further in Section 3.3 with specific refer-
ence to Putnam’s (1975) hypothesis of division of linguistic labour.
24 Naming & Framing at Level 1
are likely to have existed even then. The need to (also) include cog-
nitive variables such as knowledge and concepts to fully explain the
language-reality interface becomes even more evident for socially
and culturally still deeper embedded categories such as associ-
ate professors, fake news, and water hammers: It takes more than
pointing out an associate professor or a piece of fake news “out
there” to know what qualifies them for the title and to recognize the
next instance encountered.
On this background, the key precondition for successfully
introducing a new (general) name in a given language can be narrowed
down to the existence of a salient concept in the relevant population
for whatever it lexicalizes. However, such an understanding also en-
tails a methodological challenge: How do we identify concepts and
assess their internal structure and situational or general salience in-
dependently of the lexical expressions that they may or may not (yet)
have been provided with? Without going into extensive methodolog-
ical details in the present work, it should be noted that such methods
have indeed been developed and are routinely applied in some fields.
In knowledge engineering and terminology management, for in-
stance, methods have been developed for bottom-up extraction and
modelling of conceptual structures (ontologies) from text corpora,
expert interviews, informants’ performance in category-generation
and item-sorting tasks, and other indicators of structured concep-
tual knowledge (Ribeiro & Cerveira, 2018; Madsen & Thomsen,
2015; Pinto & Martins, 2004; Liu et al., 2003; Kim, Suh, & Hwang,
2003; Ross & Murphy, 1999). Taking a more behaviour-oriented
perspective, marketers and consumer psychologists have further-
more mapped consumers’ establishment of goal-derived categories
in simulated decision-making situations while pursuing set goals
such as buying food for a healthy breakfast or a long car drive
(Huh, Vosgerau, & Morewedge, 2016; Nguyen & McCullough,
2009; Shocker, Bayus, & Kim, 2004; Ratneshwar, Barsalou, Pech-
mann, & Moore, 2001). In future research, the applicability of such
methodologies might be tested also relative to other domains, say,
voters’ and medias’ categorization of political agendas or alterna-
tive ways of supporting climate sustainability, thereby supplement-
ing insights gained thorough established methods such as text and
discourse analysis (Poberezhskaya & Ashe, 2018; Drews & van den
Bergh, 2016; Klüver & Sagarzaz, 2016).
However, while being a necessary precondition for lexicaliza-
tion, conceptual salience is not per definition a sufficient one. The
dynamic character of both cognition and language appears to leave
Naming & Framing at Level 1 25
room for a “grey zone.” As already mentioned, the typological pref-
erences of individual languages may thus put different sorts of in-
formation “first in line” to become unambiguously lexicalized, as
we saw it with the naming of round objects in English versus French
in Section 1.2. Moreover, even if a concept has grown salient with
a group of individuals who speak the same language, it may take a
while before someone suggests a name for expressing it – if that hap-
pens at all. The degree of everyday communicative importance also
seems to be a factor here. The inclusion of mansplaining and han-
gry in the Oxford English Dictionary mentioned earlier may serve
as a perhaps somewhat anecdotic illustration of such “grey zone”
cases. Less anecdotic examples are deep state and fake news which,
indeed, seem to have filled essential gaps in current socio-political
debates.
1.4 Success Criteria for Naming at Level 1 Revisited
The total picture is therefore something like this: Chances of
successfully introducing a new name in a given language are good
if the cognitive ground has already been prepared by the salience
of a corresponding concept in (parts of) the relevant population. In
that case, not too many additional cues will be required from the
built-in semantic potential of the name itself (i.e. naming & framing
at Level 2) and from the way the name is framed by other words and
nonverbal cues in running communication (i.e. naming & framing
at Level 3) for people to understand the name as intended and start
spreading it further. By contrast, names for completely new objects
and phenomena (or ways of seeing them) cannot be expected to
match a concept that is salient with too many people in advance.
And yet, this is precisely the scenario, say, when a company intro-
duces an innovative product (as smartphones and tablets were once)
or researchers suggest a new theoretical paradigm. In such cases,
the concept must gradually be “made” salient with still more people
in parallel with exposing them to the name. This poses different
demands both to the choice of name (at Level 2) and to its framing
in running communication (at Level 3) as further discussed in the
chapters to follow.
Before proceeding, it needs a brief mention that the successful
introduction of a name for something does not automatically imply
that people will agree on its meaning in every respect. People may
have different opinions on such matters as what makes a company a
genuine startup or a fruit drink a genuine smoothie which indicates
26 Naming & Framing at Level 1
that the conceptual structures that these people connect with the
names are not entirely identical. This perspective is addressed in
further depth in Section 3.3. At present, the simple point is that the
provision of “a name for it” is still the first precondition for any
such variations and negotiations of meaning becoming possible in
the first place.
2 Naming & Framing
at Level 2
The Joyce Principle
2.1 Juliet’s Wisdom versus Joyce’s Creativity
One thing is “having a name for it”; another is how the choice of
name may affect people’s understanding of “it” and how they get
to agree on what exactly “it” is and what it means to them. In an
illustrative account focusing primarily on brand and product nam-
ing while being largely unknown beyond the realm of marketing,
Collins (1977) suggests a set of terms that rather aptly captures the
essence of these two perspectives: the Joyce principle and the Juliet
principle. The same basic issues have been addressed in further
depth in other disciplines, but not as aptly named. We will therefore
consider Collins’s point first.
Collins first establishes the Juliet principle, as encapsulated in
the following much-quoted line from William Shakespeare’s play
Romeo and Juliet (2010 [1597]): “Juliet: What’s in a name? That
which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet; so
Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, retain that dear perfection
which he owes without that title.” In other words, the name does not
matter, the important thing is what it denotes and what we think
and say about it. In principle, a sandwich might just as well have
been called a cardigan in English and vice versa (to use Collins’s ex-
amples) which would have no bearing on their meaning. Likewise,
brand names such as Kellogg’s and Reebok do not in themselves say
anything about cereals or sports; that link is established through
the brand communication surrounding the names only.
However, names like Whumies or British Bakeries are different
in that respect. Though one could hardly predict the exact content
of such names without knowing it already, their etymology and/or
composition (which may also include their sound structure) strongly
suggest that they could not mean just anything. Collins here refers
to the Joyce principle, hinting at the use of self-created suggestive
words in the literary work of James Joyce. However, rather than
28 Naming & Framing at Level 2
discussing which principle is the “right” one (a longstanding debate
reaching far beyond marketing, see below), Collins’s approach has
become a catalyst for presuming a coexistence of both principles
and for addressing the possible interplay between them in strategic
naming & framing processes (Muzellec, 2006; Riezebos, Kist, &
Kootstra, 2003: 51ff; Usunier & Shaner, 2002). In the following, we
take this line of reasoning further, beginning with the Joyce prin-
ciple (corresponding to Level 2 of naming & framing in Table 0.1)
and continuing with the Juliet principle (corresponding to Level 3
of naming & framing in Table 0.1) in the next chapter.
2.2 Limits to Lexical Arbitrariness: Names Talk!
A just indicated, Collins’s study mirrors a much broader debate.
In traditional and, in particular, structural language theory, it re-
mains a widespread assumption that the link between a word in it-
self (viewed as a string of sounds or written characters) and what it
means is a matter of sheer convention, that is, completely arbitrary
(Saussure, 2011 [1916]; Lyons, 1977: 70ff; Hockett, 1958; Hjelmslev,
1953 [1943]). This may make good sense for sandwich and cardigan (if
one is unaware of the etymological prehistory that these names actu-
ally do have) and even better sense for simple singe-root words such
as cow, leg, or love, that simply “mean what they mean.” H owever,
the majority of names found in developed languages are not quite
as arbitrary. As Langacker (1987: 12) bluntly states it, “the arbi-
trary character of the linguistic sign is easily overstated, despite the
important kernel of truth in the principle of l’arbitraire du signe.” For
English, the list of such “Joyce-principle names” could thus easily
be continued by e.g. crash, smoothie, bug (the malware), startup (the
company type), blueberry, monkey wrench, deep state, range anxiety,
managed democracy, red light district, Burger King, and Whopper.
Linguists and semioticians who acknowledge the additional se-
mantic complexity of such examples refer to them as non-arbitrary
or motivated in one way or the other (Marzo, 2015; Kress, 2010;
1993; Nöth, 1995: 240–256; Waugh, 1993; Ullmann, 1962; Wüster,
1959/1960). We will here resort to Ullmann’s (1962: 81–93) classic
classification of different types of lexical motivation which adds
essential details to Collins’s illustrative but somewhat sketchy
account on this point:
• Phonetic motivation based on a sense of iconic or symbolic
connection between the sound structure of the name and what
Naming & Framing at Level 2 29
it denotes, e.g. boom, crash, smoothie, Yahoo. A related case
could be made for graphic motivation (though this aspect is
not taken up by Ullman) in particular for product and brand
names where the choice of fonts, colours, surrounding imagery,
etc., may become an intrinsic part of the name’s expectable ap-
pearance and support certain expectations in their own right;
take Coca Cola or Burger King (cf. Klimchuk & Krasovec, 2013:
64–104; Lee & Ang, 2003).
• Morphological motivation which emerges when a name is
composed of smaller units (morphemes, words) which have a
meaning of their own that jointly hint at the meaning of the
whole name. If we constrain our focus to the Indo-European
languages, the predominant patterns (while unevenly distrib-
uted across these languages) are affixation, compounding, and
the formation of phrasal lexemes, as illustrated by English
names such as gamer, radicalization, clickbait, sleep hygiene, Me
Too, and Michael Learns to Rock (the band).
• Semantic motivation where a new meaning is attached to an exist-
ing name on the basis of a meaning it already had, usually relying
on metaphor or metonymy of some sort, e.g. (computer) cookie,
house (the music style), Apple (the brand name), and so on.
More than one type of motivation will often have contributed at dif-
ferent stages of the formation of a given name, e.g. Baby Boomers.
The wider implications of these observations have however not
as yet been exhaustively explored. While the formal aspects of
word formation have received substantial attention in the linguis-
tic literature (for a comprehensive overview, see Müller, Ohnheiser,
Olsen, & Rainer, 2015), the semantic and cognitive consequences of
choosing one word formation pattern in preference to another for
naming something specific have been less systematically addressed,
leaving essential issues open to debate (Marzo, 2015; Libben, 2014;
Smith, Barratt, & Zlatev, 2014; Waugh, 1993; Lyons, 1977: 534–550).
Notably, this includes the degree to which any underlying motiva-
tion matters at all once the name has been generally accepted. In
other words, even if some names “talk” more than others, there is
no guarantee that people will feel obliged to listen.
Ultimately, lexical non-arbitrariness can be described as a simple
side effect of the circumstance that the demand for new words is ever
increasing, while the crystallization of new, truly arbitrary lexical
expression-units (word roots) in organically evolving languages pro-
ceeds at a very slow pace. This renders re-use and re-organization
30 Naming & Framing at Level 2
of existing linguistic resources as the primary sources of lexical in-
novation, as manifest in the archetypical patterns just presented
(Sager, 1990: 55–90). However, creating new names on these grounds
is bound to influence the full communicative potential of the resul-
tant expression-unit in essential respects. Moreover, that potential
is demonstrably being exploited by strategically minded commu-
nicators for pursuing specific communicative goals, whether fully
aware of the underlying linguistic and cognitive mechanisms or not.
To take a few examples. Problems with sleeping and ways of deal-
ing with them have been recognized for ages. Yet, the term sleep
hygiene has consolidated this issue as a distinct medical field, not
only by providing a compact heading for research and practices
(Irish, Kline, Gunn, Buysse, & Hall, 2015; Stepanski & Wyatt,
2003; Brown, Buboltz, & Soper, 2002), but also by transposing
certain key properties of hygiene in the traditional sense to a new
field (also known as property mapping, cf. Swaminathan, Gürhan-
Canli, Kubat, & Hayran, 2015; Wisniewski, 1996). Likewise, while
the idea of using taxation to support environmental policies has
a long prehistory, names such as ecotax and green tax have con-
tributed to qualifying this agenda in a readily comprehensible and,
at least to some people, appealing way (Drews & van den Bergh,
2016; Backhaus, 1999). Transposed to the analysis of conceptual
structure given in Section 1.3.1 (Figure 1.2), the name highlights
specific essential and/or prototypical components of the underlying
(already salient) concept and may also add new ones that would not
necessarily have been part of the concept otherwise, for instance,
a direct linkage between environmental concerns and the concept
of ecology.
Turning from morphological to semantic motivation, the word
bubble has recently been relaunched as a name for an intellectual
state where a person only seeks and receives (especially online) in-
formation that is consistent with his or her pre-established beliefs
and values (as first suggested by Pariser, 2011; see also Nguyen, Hui,
Harper, Terveen, & Konstan, 2014; Resnick, Garrett, Kriplean,
Munson, & Stroud, 2013). Here, the metaphorical potential of bub-
ble contributes to highlighting both the hermetically closed nature
of the condition and its potential for bursting, or deliberately being
burst (for further discussion on the persuasive power of metaphors,
see Charteris-Black, 2011; Handl & Schmid, 2011; Fairhurst & Sarr,
1996; Lakoff, 1987: 377–585). Finally, the auditive appeal of product
names such as slush ice and brand names such as Yahoo has long
been subject to explicit attention in marketing research encouraging
Naming & Framing at Level 2 31
companies to supplement sheer intuition with more systematic
pre-testing in that regard (Sidhu & Pexman, 2018; Krishna, 2012;
Shrum & Lowrey, 2007; Klink, 2001).
A special case is posed by deliberate efforts to rename objects
or events that are already covered by an existing name, at least
as far as denotation is concerned, by introducing a substitute
name. For example, the name sex worker (Jackson, 2016; Levy &
Jakobsson, 2014) has been suggested as an alternative to prostitute
(and overlapping terms) for conveying some of the same concep-
tual components, while also adding new ones that entail greater
societal legitimacy.1 Compositionally, this is backed up by estab-
lishing a link to the conventional meaning of worker. However, the
inclusion of that very element has also led to severe criticism from
other interested parties who see it as a way of legitimizing brothel-
keeping (Banyard, 2016). The latter circumstance illustrates that
the composition of a name can never ensure the intended reading
by itself, only in combination with surrounding contextual cues,
i.e. the Juliet principle, as further discussed in Chapter 3. But it can
definitely give a push.
Another example is information war which according to some an-
alysts has been adopted by Russian politicians as a substitute for
the more peacefully sounding term strategic communications (in the
specific military sense) to promote a more aggressive (re)conceptu-
alization of NATO’s strategic intentions (Thomas, 2015). However,
other authors use the former name in a broader sense, referring to a
type of warfare which is gaining still greater significance across the
globe (Klein, 2018; Grinyaev, 2001; Molander, Riddile, Wilson, &
Williamson, 1996). Again, the choice of name highlights different
conceptual components of, in other respects, closely related con-
cepts, entailing different checks and balances between legitimate
goals and means. Stated differently, we witness a battle for defi-
nitional power over what Gallie (1955) labels essentially contested
concepts (see Section 3.3) where the choice of name has in this case
become an integrated part of the game.
1 It could be argued that to the wordmaker this is not just a matter of modifying
an existing concept, but of lexicalizing a whole new concept that has grown
salient with the group in question, even if it happens to overlap with an already
lexicalized one in terms of extension (category members) if not intension (cate-
gorization criteria). By creating a new name, the carriers/proponents of the new
concept will thus invite other people to reconceptualize their own understand-
ing of the individuals in question from scratch.
32 Naming & Framing at Level 2
Not all non-arbitrary names seem equally well chosen for their
purpose, however. For example, it has been argued that the choice
of name was a major reason why a (somewhat hastily conceived)
proposal by the Danish government to establish a betalingsring
(lit. ≈ ‘payment ring’) around central Copenhagen to reduce car
traffic ended up as a complete failure in 2012 (for a recapitula-
tion of the events in English, see Birkbak, 2017). In comparison,
a similar arrangement labelled congestion charge has been quite
successful for several years in London (Leape, 2006). During the
preparation of the Danish proposal, the extra tax revenues (i.e. the
payment aspect) were indeed a major consideration for the politi-
cians involved, but it was wisely decided to foreground environ-
mental concerns as the main political motivation. However, what
was on top of the politicians’ minds nevertheless somehow slipped
into the name first used in public, and that name was immediately
taken over by the media and came to dominate the whole public
debate in a negative, obstacle-oriented direction. Subsequent at-
tempts to reframe the issue by speaking of miljøring (lit. ≈ ‘ecor-
ing’), trængselsring (lit. ≈ ‘congestion ring’), and trafikring (lit. ≈
‘traffic ring’) did not make much of a difference. The harm had
already been done.
Paradoxically, other names may carry a motivation which is
just as poorly balanced with key elements of the intended content
– or make little or no sense to a majority of language users in
the first place – but still fulfil their purpose very well. For ex-
ample, the business term startup says nothing about attributes
such as innovative business idea, fast growth, scalability, or ori-
entation towards resale, but would rather seem to apply to any
newly started business. And yet, a concept (and hype) involving
precisely such factors has successfully evolved around the name
(even if different weight is attributed to each of them by different
authors, e.g. Blank & Dorf, 2012; Ries, 2011; see also Section 3.3).
Likewise, many speakers of ordinary English are capable of buy-
ing Brussels sprouts for dinner, operating an Apple computer, or
even finding a monkey wrench in their toolbox without having any
idea of why they are so called. Collins’s examples sandwich and
cardigan illustrate the same point. Importantly, people may well
still conceive these names as motivated in one way or another, but
the Juliet principle seems to have taken over completely from the
Joyce principle when it comes to ensuring a shared understanding.
How come?
Naming & Framing at Level 2 33
2.3 Additional Leads from Language Processing
Essential leads to understanding the mechanisms in play here may be
found in the otherwise somewhat insular field of experimental psy-
chology and psycholinguistics investigating people’s spontaneous
decoding of (what we here call) non-arbitrary names, with a major
focus on composite names, in particular, noun-noun compounds
(Juhasz, 2018; Schäfer, 2018; Schmidtke, Matsuki, & Kuperman,
2017; Libben, 2014; Aitchison, 2012: 145–168; Gill & Dubé, 2007;
Libben & Jarema, 2006; Krott & Nicoladis, 2005; Andrews & Davis,
1999; Ryder, 1994; Sandra, 1990; Manelis & Tharp, 1977).
The results and their interpretation are subject to continuous de-
bate, but the general picture seems to be that we do not routinely
split up familiar compounds such as butter cookie or Brussels sprout
in order to establish a meaningful connection between the constitu-
ents, but automatically retrieve the full-word meaning that we have
acquired at an earlier stage (even if the constituents may still play a
certain role in word recognition without affecting whole-word se-
mantics). By contrast, such an additional semantic processing will
always take place when people encounter an unfamiliar compound
such as bird phone or train juice (examples taken from Gill & Dubé,
2007) as indicated by longer response latencies in word-decision and
other experimental tasks. Here, the recipient is left to extract some
immediate sense from the structurally implied but underdetermined
statement ‘(it’s some kind of) X [e.g. phone, juice] that is somehow
related to (some kind of) Y [e.g. birds, trains]’ by inferring addi-
tional information at his or her own risk. The process is supported
by factors such as the compatibility of the concepts conveyed by
the constituents (Lynott & Connell, 2010; Ran & Duimering, 2010;
Gagné & Spalding, 2006), frequency-based analogies with famil-
iar complex words containing the same constituents (Krott, 2009;
Bybee, 2007, 1995; Krott & Nicoladis, 2005), reliance on recurrent
functional patterns and schemas (Goldberg, 2006; Ryder, 1994), and
contextual cues if such are available (Zlatev, Smith, van de Weijer, &
Skydsgaard, 2010; Gagné, Spaling, & Gorrie, 2005; Mori & Nagy,
1999),2 as matched against general world knowledge and common
sense.
2 Unlike the other factors mentioned, the role of context has so far received
relatively limited attention in the mainstream experimental literature on this
topic. This can be reasonably explained by a wish to ensure experimental
34 Naming & Framing at Level 2
Notably, while the procedures just described best qualify as in-
stances of situational (pragmatic) inference-making rather than the
retrieval of a pre-determined (semantic) meaning, they may also be
a first step towards crystallizing such a more permanent (semantic)
meaning that people will come to connect with the novel compound
regardless of the situation as further argued below (see also Smith,
Barratt, & Zlatev, 2014; Zlatev et al., 2010). This is in line with Ariel’s
(2010: 271–274) proposal to understand code and inference as two
modes of sense-making displaying a permanent division of labour
with each other rather than as functionally separate levels of decod-
ing. In turn, that aligns with the general observation that language
in its capacity as a conventionalized system or code (“langue”) is
not only generated, but constantly adjusted and expanded in the
actual communicative behaviour (“parole”) of concrete individuals
on concrete occasions as anticipated in Section 0.3.
Of course, even for familiar compounds, people do sometimes
stop and reflect on matters such as “why are butter cookies called
butter cookies?” or “do Brussel sprouts really come from Brussels?”
(as indicated by the dotted circle in Figure 2.1a), a phenomenon
known as metalinguistic reflection (Simard, 2004). However, an ap-
propriate answer to such questions is not decisive for mutual under-
standing. More vitally, it has been demonstrated that if a familiar
compound is presented in a sufficiently biased context (i.e. framing
at Level 3), the recipient may be compelled to decompose and re-
interpret the compound, for example, to understand bug spray as
a spray produced by bugs (not for killing bugs) or Hawaiian pizza3
as referring to a (frozen) product actually imported from Hawaii
(cf. Gagné et al., 2005 and Smith et al., 2014, respectively). In these
experiments, the effects were brought about by the surrounding
control by excluding all non-mandatory and potentially confounding vari-
ables. However, it also limits the external validity of the results in essential re-
spects, considering that in most real-life situations novel compounds will be
encountered in one sort of co(n)textual framing or the other. Moreover, those
studies that do take contextual factors into account (Smith et al., 2014; Zlatev
et al., 2010; Gagné et al., 2005; Mori & Nagy, 1999) have demonstrated the vast
potential of context for overturning any pre-contextually preferred interpre-
tations that might otherwise be explainable in terms of the other factors just
mentioned, as well as others, including the existence of an already established
whole-word meaning. This observation will be taken further later in the present
section and in Section 3.2.1.
3 The original target word was the Danish Hawaii-pizza which is a plain noun-
noun compound unlike its commonplace English equivalent which is an Adj+N
constriction. However, this hardly has much bearing on the point made here.
The study in question is addressed in further detail in Section 2.3.1.
Naming & Framing at Level 2 35
Figure 2.1 P
rocessing of a familiar versus an unfamiliar (novel) noun-
noun compound name. (a) Simple decoding of familiar name.
If interpreted at all, the noun-noun relation will merely give
rise to metalinguistic reflections and expression-based conno-
tations on the part of the recipient. (b) Situated sense-making
and concept formation triggered by unfamiliar name. The
noun-noun relation is mandatorily interpreted with the recip-
ient’s general world knowledge and available contextual cues
serving as disambiguating variables.
36 Naming & Framing at Level 2
sentence “as a defence mechanisms against predators, the Alas-
kan beetle can release a deadly bug spray” (instead of “Debbie
made sure that every time she went outside she wore plenty of bug
spray”), and by varying the basic design elements brand name, ver-
bal claim, and picture on otherwise identical product packaging
fronts, respectively. We will return to the vast potential of multi-
modal contexts for inducing reframings of the latter sort in Sec-
tion 3.2.1. At present, the key point is that the surrounding context
can make the respondents treat a well-known name as if it was new
and try to assess its meaning from scratch, using the information at
hand (as shown in Figure 2.1b).
What tends to go unnoticed in the mainstream compound-
processing literature, however, is that both such reinterpretations
and recipients’ interpretation of genuinely novel compounds are, in
essence, instances of word acquisition rather than ordinary language
processing. This perspective has mostly been investigated in neigh-
bouring fields, focusing on children’s acquisition of words that the
rest of us have already acquired (Clark, 2018; Tomasello, 2003;
Markman, 1990) and on foreign language learning and teaching
(Graves, August, & Mancilla-Martinez, 2013; Prince, 1996) as fur-
ther addressed in Section 3.1. In both cases, the primary research in-
terest has been recipients’ utilization of contextual cues in the widest
sense of the term (seeing and touching the denoted objects, hearing
parents’ or teachers’ oral explanations, reading course material,
looking at pictures, etc.) for gradually figuring out the meaning of
the word, i.e. the Juliet principle. However, when adults encounter
genuinely novel or, for that matter, not yet familiar, compounds and
other non-arbitrary names, the built-in semantic potential of the
name seems to serve as an additional cue (a semantic-to-semantic
sign, cf. Wüster, 1959/1960: 191; see also Zlatev et al., 2010: 2811) that
together with the information deducible from the context will lead
the interpretation in a particular direction. That is, the Joyce prin-
ciple will play its part as well. The final outcome, then, depends on
general-purpose heuristics applied to the concrete instance in view
also of available general world knowledge and plain common sense,
i.e. mechanisms comparable to those further discussed in Section
4.5.3 for Level 4 framings.
Connecting further to the analysis of human categorization
presented in Section 1.3.2, this processing will at first only enable
the recipient to crystallize some tentative ad hoc concept, but that
concept may gradually evolve into a more stable and elaborate one.
If the concept is already salient in the relevant population, that will
Naming & Framing at Level 2 37
accelerate the process, as argued for mansplaining and deep state
in Section 1.3.2. As still more people encounter the name in Level
3 contexts that support the whole-word meaning in question, an
intersubjective consensus will gradually emerge that links the name
directly to the concept in question and will be valid to these people
even in the most neutral context. Those who share that consensus
will therefore no longer need to split up and analyse the name (i.e.
resort to the Joyce principle) in order to retrieve the whole-word
meaning in question and use the name accordingly. That is, they
will reach the equilibrium state shown in Figure 2.1a. What is left is
a potential for metalinguistic reflection which may trigger certain
expression-based connotations, just at the name may, at any time,
be reframed by a contradictive Level 3 context, starting the whole
process anew (i.e. changing the scenario back to the one shown in
Figure 2.1b).
2.4 Lessons Learned from Joyce
What are the practical implications of these empirical findings to
professional communicators and to anyone who wants to under-
stand when and how choosing one motivation for a name in prefer-
ence to another makes a tangible difference?
First, the findings suggest in which situations the Joyce principle
should be considered a major strategic factor alongside the Juliet
principle and in which not. The former is the case when the de-
clared intention of the communicator is to introduce a genuinely
novel name (or profoundly change the meaning of an existing one)
rather than merely selecting a well-known name among other alter-
natives to convey a particular message. Apart from the scenarios
already discussed, this also includes the suggestion of substitute
names intended to take over (parts of) the meaning of existing
ones, as illustrated earlier by sex worker versus prostitute. By con-
trast, it is hardly worth anyone’s effort to substitute and/or reframe
well- established and semantically uncontroversial names such
as cocktail, monkey wrench, or French fries despite their arguably
less-than-optimal (and/or obsolete) motivations – even if Freedom
fries was in fact at some point suggested as a substitute for the latter
in US English to send a political message (Benczes, 2006a). Brand
names such as Reebok and Volkswagen illustrate the same point.
Second, it becomes clear what can and what can not be achieved
by creating a name with one motivation in preference to another in
those cases where this can in fact make a difference. While the name
38 Naming & Framing at Level 2
can never tell the whole story on its own, it can foreground particu-
lar components of the (always more complex) conceptual structures
it is supposed to lexicalize, say, by presenting smartphones as smart
and sleep hygiene as a kind of hygiene. If poorly chosen, it may,
however, also foster an undesired balance between key components
of the intended concept as we saw it with the Danish name betalings-
ring (lit. ≈ ‘payment ring’) earlier; here, a name such as miljøring (lit.
≈ ‘ecoring’) might have become a virtual game changer, or rather a
better game initiator since launching alternative names post-festum
turned out not to be enough to change the negative spiral of events
viewed from the Danish government’s perspective. Moreover, such
influences on the concept’s final structure may well prevail even af-
ter the name has become conventionalized and the analysis of its
motivation therefore becomes optional. That is, the name may still
serve as a “reminder” of the rationale behind its original motivation
on the level of metalinguistic reflections, though even that effect
tends to erode with time.
None of the above alters the strong potential of the Juliet principle
which may, indeed, overrule any Joyce-principle influences from
the very outset. For example, if a new brand name is backed up
by massive and versatile marketing communications (advertising,
mass media coverage, word of mouth), it can “say” almost anything
literally and still be successful (this perspective is taken further in
Section 3.2). But that will, of course, take a greater communica-
tive effort than if the built-in semantic potential of the name plays
along.
Another perspective is added to the whole issue when names
crystallized in one language are transposed to other languages
using word elements and combinations of such that support an
unforeseen literal reading. Particularly for commercial names, nu-
merous more or less well-documented examples flourish in the pop-
ular, not least in the digital, media, though few of them have been
subject to more deep-going analyses (an exception being certain re-
current naming flaws made by foreign companies in China; see Sec-
tion 1.2). Among the more credible examples from other languages
is Mitsubishi’s car model Pajero which was introduced under that
name but hastily renamed Montero for Spanish-speaking markets,
allegedly because pajero is slang for ‘masturbator’ in several South
American Spanish dialects. Another much-quoted example, turn-
ing to China once again, is Microsoft’s software program Bing
for which the sound structure of the original name was rendered
by means of a logogram character that (also) means ‘disease’ in
Naming & Framing at Level 2 39
Mandarin Chinese. For further details on these and other exam-
ples, see e.g. Language Nerds (2019); Gitlin (2009); Walker (n.d.).
The simple point intended here is that not only contextual refram-
ings within the same language (as discussed in Section 2.3), but
also a change in general linguistic surroundings seems capable to
“re-evoke” the Joyce principle and make recipients interpret a name
from scratch.
Speaking of naming more broadly, many attempts have been
made to pinpoint what a “good name” is, or should be, within fields
that span from marketing and branding (Arora, Kalro, & Sharma,
2015; Di Francesco, 2013; Riezebos et al., 2003: 104–125; Kohli &
LaBahn, 1997) to the management and standardization of pro-
fessional terminologies (Ten Hacken & Panocová, 2015; Wright
& Budin, 1997; ISO, 2009: 7.3.1–7.3.8), or the naming of political
movements (Shah, 2018). This has fostered a multitude of overlap-
ping and sometimes contradictive criteria (e.g. transparency versus
brevity), most of which relate to inherent properties of the name, i.e.
to the Joyce principle. The present analysis, then, might contribute
to a more balanced approach where not only the built-in semantic
potential of the name, but the totality of factors that determine the
consolidation of its final meaning in the relevant target group(s) are
considered and operated upon in parallel.
Methodologically, this requires a combination of in-depth
conceptual analysis with assessments of plausible spontaneous
interpretations of candidate names by the target group in view of
expectable background knowledge and pre-established cognitive
schemas and rationales. The next step is pre-testing, considering
also the impact of surrounding contextual cues, as further dis-
cussed from Section 3.1 onwards. While more time-consuming,
this may prove a useful supplement to the reliance on intuition and
accumulated practical experience which remains the major driver
(and not per definition a bad one) behind such naming decisions
today.
3 Naming & Framing
at Level 3
The Juliet Principle
3.1 The Multimodal Character of Level 3 Framings
A major virtue of Collins’s Juliet metaphor (and of Shakespeare’s
original observation) is that it subsumes under a common heading
a number of factors that play the same basic role in naming &
framing processes but are otherwise rarely viewed in integration.
Thus, apart from the built-in motivation that many expression-units
have (viz. the Joyce principle as further discussed in the previous
chapter), the only factors that can influence how we understand
a name, and modify that over time, are how (including when and
where) it is used by others and how we experience whatever they use
it about. In other words, the genesis of lexical meanings depends on
contextual cues in the widest sense of the term (see also Gennari,
MacDonald, Postle, & Seidenberg, 2007; Nagy, 1995).1
To illustrate, the reader might reflect on how (s)he acquired the
meaning of the name smartphone. For the author of this book, the
full sequence of events would seem to include hearing the word on
TV and reading it in printed and online media without taking much
notice at first. Moreover, afterwards it is hard to determine if it was
smartphone or the brand-specific name iPhone that was encountered
first, since the framings tended to overlap at that time. Subsequent
1 The meaning-in-context issue has come to cover rather different sub-issues in
the language-theoretical literature. As for the lexical (word) level, this includes
both how context helps choosing between different conventionalized meanings
of polysemous words (Williams, 1992) and how different parts of the conven-
tionalized meaning(s) of words are activated differently in different contexts
(sometimes referred to as different “senses,” e.g. Paradis, 2004). However, our
present focus is on the way contextual cues contribute to the of genesis and
evolution of such conventionalized meanings in the first place, ensuring their
subsequent validity also in neutral contexts such as dictionary entries (see also
Zlatev, Smith, van de Weijer, & Skydsgaard, 2010).
Naming & Framing at Level 3 41
cues included hearing friends and colleagues praising their new
smartphones, seeing people using the devices, receiving messages,
films, and music sent from smartphones (but received by e-mail),
seeing ads and reading sales offers concerning smartphones, and
ultimately buying one. The latter step added hands-on sensory
experience with using a smartphone and gradually learning which
features (at that point) were common to most smartphones or
model- or brand-specific. Only during the preparation of this book
did the process involve consulting explicit definitions and overviews
of the topic, adding yet new details. In other words, still more
specific candidates for essential and prototypical components in-
volving both sensory and propositional information were added to
the emerging concept along the way, and that process continues …
for all of us.
Understanding how such influences combine and interact in
shaping the meaning of particular names seems to constitute a
reasonable topic for investigation in its own right. For strategi-
cally minded communicators, an additional issue is to what degree
they can be controlled. Several very different disciplines contribute
pieces to that puzzle.
Research into children’s acquisition of new words (Clark, 2018;
Vygotsky, 2012 [1934]); Goldberg, 2006: 69–102; Tomasello, 2003:
43–93; Piaget, 2002 [1926]; Markman, 1990) addresses the strategies
applied by children at different ages for filtering out and general-
izing information from the speech of adults and from non-verbal
(sensory) cues to make still more qualified guesses about the mean-
ings of still more abstract words. Research into foreign language
learning and teaching furthermore considers factors such as class-
room instruction, illustrations, and the role of translation, both for
children and adults (Graves, August, & Mancilla-Martinez, 2013;
Prince, 1996; Willis, 1981). Other facets yet are added by research
into adults’ spontaneous interpretation of unfamiliar compounds
and other non-arbitrary words as already discussed in Section 2.3.
Taking a different perspective, terminology management re-
search and practice stress the importance of explicit and, ideally,
normative definitions, though it is also recognized that this ideal is
not always met (ISO, 2009: 6.1–6.5; Giboreau et al., 2007; de Bessé,
1997). Pursuing other goals yet, marketing researchers and practi-
tioners have investigated which features can be verbally ascribed
(and in fact given) to new types of products in order for them, and
their names, to be comprehended and accepted (Gattol, Sääksjärvi,
Gill, & Schoormans, 2016; Charette, Hooker, & Stanton, 2015).
42 Naming & Framing at Level 3
Moreover, the construction of brand images is usually based on
a vast array of cues surrounding the brand name, spanning from
colours, shapes, and images on the product itself to advertising,
independent media coverage, sponsorships, celebrity endorsement,
storytelling, word of mouth, and so on (Keller, 2016, 2001; Rindell,
2008; Fog, Budtz, & Yakaboylu, 2005; Aaker, 1991). Systematic
framing efforts in the public sphere are also vital to what we here
label naming & framing at Level 4 with a traditional emphasis on
verbal means, but often involving also visual ones such as photos
and films. The primary goal here is to influence public opinion on
subject matters that go beyond the meaning of single words, yet
with a strong potential for also affecting peoples understanding of
the words used for this purpose taken individually; see Sections
4.1–4.3.
All such manifestations of the Juliet principle complete the tool-
box that communicators can draw on when engaging in goal-driven
naming & framing activities. This may not be new to practitioners
(Mautner, 2016; Rundh, 2009), but it does not always transpire
from the more specialized areas of research mentioned earlier. A
framework capable of facilitating a more holistic understanding
across such domains is offered by the paradigm known as multi-
modal communication research (Ledin & Machin, 2020; Powell,
Boomgaarden, de Swert, & de Vreese, 2019; Jewitt, Bezemer, &
O’Halloran, 2016; Forceville, 2014; Jones, 2014; Holsanova, 2012;
Kress, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; see also Section 0.3). The
fundamental insight embraced by this research is that most com-
municative processes involve a combination of different semiotic
modalities (spoken and/or written language, pictures, logos, co-
lours, shapes, gesture, immediate sensory-motor experiences, and
so on2) and that the communicative effects of choosing particular
combinations of such modalities in preference to others, consider-
ing also recipients’ ways and sequences of decoding them, can and
should be a research focus in its own right.
Present-day multimodal communication research draws upon
and combines insights gained across a number of established
disciplines, including visual rhetoric, perceptual and cognitive
2 The exact delimitation of these modalities may vary with the specific purpose of
the analysis but overarching distinguishing features include the human senses
appealed to, the matter in which the signs materialize, and their degree of con-
ventionalization versus immediate intelligibility; see Forceville (2014: 51–52) for
an inclusive approach embracing most such variations.
Naming & Framing at Level 3 43
psychology, cognitive pragmatics, social semiotics, functional
linguistics, and conversation analysis (see Jewitt et al., 2016 for
a comprehensive overview). Despite variations in theoretical
orientation and empirical focus, the overarching agenda could be
summarized as follows: First, rather than merely recognizing the
existence and co-occurrence of different semiotic modalities, the
emphasis is put on establishing what unites and what differentiates
their communicative potential taken separately, and which possi-
bilities and constraints different combinations of such modalities
offer to communicators when pursuing particular communicative
goals. Second, apart from focusing on sheer potential, emphasis is
also put on recipients’ actual decoding of the total semiotic mix in
running communication, in that the order in which its individual
elements are attended to (and whether they are attended to at all)
may yield very different results.
At the same time, and partially in parallel, an increased inter-
est in understanding the full potential of different combinations
of (what we here call) semiotic modalities for pursuing particular
communicative goals has developed across a number of more
performance-oriented disciplines with a view to practices such
as news coverage, advertising, packaging and web design, health
promotion, and others. Much of this research does, however, not
refer directly to the broader agenda described earlier, though some
does (Fenko, Nicolaas, & Galetzka, 2018; Powell, Boomgaarden,
de Swert, & de Vreese, 2015; Kim, Thomas, Sankaranarayana,
Gedeon, & Yoon, 2015; Ares et al., 2013; Rundh, 2009; Chandon
& Wansink, 2007; Clement, 2007; Sojka & Giese, 2006; Riezebos,
Kist, & Kootstra, 2003; see also Section 3.2.1).
Applying insights gained in the totality of domains just men-
tioned to the investigation of naming & framing processes appears
to pose a good opportunity for establishing new collaborative links
and synergies within and across them.
3.2 An Illustration: High- versus Low-Budget Route
Framing of Brand and Product Names
An example of such a multimodal perspective applied specifically
to the contextual framing of novel names (though not expressed in
these terms) is the low-budget route versus the high-budget route
of brand development suggested by Riezebos et al. (2003: 80–103)
in continuation of Collins (1977) and related research (Kent &
Allen, 1994).
44 Naming & Framing at Level 3
As anticipated in Section 1.1, the conceptual structures conveyed
by brand names seem to require a somewhat different analysis
than those conveyed by general names. Thus, the core conceptual
function of categorization already lies in the fact that something
is (being called), e.g., an Apple® product or more specifically an
iPhone®. The brand value lies in the additional expectations and
associations that consumers come to connect with products car-
rying such names (Keller, 2016; Maurya & Mishra, 2012; Murphy,
1992; Aaker, 1991). The latter best qualify as a variety of proto-
typical components (both propositional and sensory) according to
the general analysis of conceptual structure given in Section 1.3.1;
see Figure 1.2. Still, the following analyses appear to be applicable
to general names as well, including unprotected (generic) product
names such as smartphone and e-cigarette as we shall see below.
The high-budget route presupposes that the brand name is backed
up by extensive advertising. Apart from traditional advertising (paid
media), the argument also seems to apply to other forms of proac-
tive market communication such as attracting positive mass media
coverage (earned media) and consumer-driven support, e.g., in the
social media (shared media) in so far as substantial resources are
still spent on promotion and PR to generate and shape that cover-
age (for an overview of the media strategies mentioned and the still
more blurring line between them, see Macnamara, Lwin, Adi, &
Zerfass, 2016). Such an approach grants the Juliet principle
a predominant role from the outset; the Joyce principle may
contribute some leads as well, but this remains optional. A clear-cut
example is the brand name Apple which means what it means to
consumers as a result of extensive and widely distributed marketing
communication, as further backed up by people’s positive first-hand
experiences with the company’s products, a factor that however
also belongs to the Juliet domain. The original meaning of the word
apple (i.e. its semantic motivation, see Section 2.2), by contrast, may
add some freshness and a twist, but it could hardly have done the
job alone (for details on the prehistory of the brand name Apple, see
Wozniak, 2006: 173–174).
The low-budget route, by contrast, presupposes that the brand
image is built up without resorting to any large-scale marketing
campaigns. In this case, the immediate communicative potential
of the brand name becomes a central factor in combination with
such cues that may be extracted from the product itself and/or its
immediate surroundings such as the product packaging (Simonet,
2016; Klimchuk & Krasovec, 2013; see also LaPlante-Dube, 2017
Naming & Framing at Level 3 45
on similar strategies applied to services presented as “packages”).
In such cases, the communication thus relies on channels that are
fully controlled by the brand owner and must be paid for in any
case, i.e. a variety of owned media to follow the terminology used
earlier, whereas any backup from earned and/or shared media is left
to self-driven “viral” processes (Berger, 2014) and the use of paid
media is minimized or skipped completely. In this scenario, the
Juliet principle and the Joyce principle therefore come to interact
more closely in a “microcosmos” directly pertaining to a potential
decision-making situation.
A clear-cut example of the low-budget approach is the brand
name Cavi-Art owned by a company that has built up a worldwide
business producing caviar substitutes based on seaweed and aro-
matic additives.3 Taking the low-budget-route thinking almost to
the limit, the company’s sales promotion has from the outset been
restricted to simply presenting the products to sales agents, retail-
ers, and ultimately consumers worldwide, without much additional
marketing apparently being needed. The motivation (in this case
morphological) that can be deduced from the brand name itself
seems to have been sufficient for intriguing the viewer in the rele-
vant way, and the rest of the story is told by the familiar shape of the
jars and the relatively transparent (even if seemingly contradictive4)
motivation of the immediate product name Seaweed Caviar (with
extensions for different variants, e.g. Black, Red, Wasabi), likewise
placed on the packaging front. No additional verbal or visual cues
appear to be required in this case.
3.2.1 Consuming the “Semiotic Cocktail”
The examples illustrate two additional points to be further consid-
ered in this and the following sub-section, respectively. The first
point is that there will always be a reciprocal influence between
all the cues involved in Level 3 framing processes, i.e. they will
3 Jens Møller Products ApS. URL: https://tang-huset.dk/en/tang-huseten/
(accessed June 2020).
4 The apparent conceptual clash between seaweed and caviar thus provides an
effective trigger for the conceptual restructuring needed to grasp the very es-
sence of the new product and generate a tentative ad-hoc concept that may
gradually be further consolidated. One framework suited for a more detailed
analysis of the cognitive processes required is conceptual blending theory
(Schmid, 2011; Fauconnier & Turner, 2003).
46 Naming & Framing at Level 3
contribute to framing each other. Thus, most of the Apple-related
framings suggested in Figure 3.1a will also involve other, themat-
ically connected names such as the product-line specific brand
names iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and MacBook, and the generic
names smartphone tablet, smartwatch, and laptop. These names all
contribute to understanding what Apple stands for as a brand name
while at the same time qualifying the meaning of each other and,
for some, being qualified by the name Apple. Non-verbal cues are
also part of the overall picture. Thus, the Apple product shown in
Figure 3.1a does not carry the name Apple at all, only a stylized
image of an apple. The link is established through the total multi-
modal communication surrounding the brand. Likewise, the brand
Figure 3.1 T
he high-budget route and the low-budget route of brand name
framing. (a) Example of the high-budget route: Apple ®. (b)
Example of the low-budget route: Cavi-Art®.
Naming & Framing at Level 3 47
name Cavi-Art and the immediate (but still manufacturer-specific
and legally protected) product name Seaweed Caviar mutually
contribute to the disambiguating each other in interplay with sur-
rounding visual cues such as the shape of the jar and the images of
seaweed and of the product itself on the label (Figure 3.1b).
The process of decoding such multimodal stimuli has become the
subject of a still growing body of observational and experimental
research, both with and without direct reference to multimodality
as a distinct phenomenon (see also Section 3.1). This includes the
use of eye-tracking technology for monitoring viewers’ distribution
of their top-down and bottom-up visual attention (i.e. looking for
something and having one’s eyes caught by something, respectively,
cf. Orquin & Loose, 2013; Chun & Wolfe, 2008) while examining
condensed “semiotic cocktails” such as product packaging fronts,
IT user interfaces, and news media pages under varying condi-
tions (Fenko et al., 2018; Bulling, 2016; Rebollar, Lidón, Martín, &
Puebla, 2015; Ares et al., 2013; Clement, 2007; Holsanova, Rahm, &
Holmqvist, 2006; Pieters & Warlop, 1999). It has, for instance,
been demonstrated that people tend to seek more information in
the surrounding context not only when encountering an unfamil-
iar product and/or product name, but also when a familiar prod-
uct name is encountered on a product packaging the total verbal
and visual potential of which contradicts the expectable product
identity, leading to additional processing time and changed search
patterns (Smith, Barratt, & Zlatev, 2014; Ares et al., 2013).
The implications of such observations for understanding the
acquisition of novel names were already touched upon in Section
2.3. To illustrate further, let us take a closer look at the former study
which targeted Danish compound food names with the aim of as-
sessing to what degree ‘X origins physically in Y’ can be considered
a default reading for noun-noun compounds of the type ‘Y [Place
Name] +X [Food Name].’ This is routinely assumed by consumer or-
ganizations and widely (though not unconditionally) backed up by
authorities and courts, but sometimes challenged by food compa-
nies in public disputes on potentially misleading food naming and
labelling (Smith et al., 2014; Smith, Clement, Møgelvang-Hansen, &
Selsøe Sørensen, 2011; see also MacMaoláin, 2015, 2007).
It was hypothesized that an interpretation in terms of phys-
ical origin was indeed a plausible default reading for novel food
names of this type if presented in a neutral context (explainable
in terms of conceptual compatibility and analogy, see also Section
2.3). A possible exception would be such cases where consumers’
48 Naming & Framing at Level 3
expectable background knowledge of the place and food in question
would speak against such an interpretation. This found support in
a first experiment in which geographically plausible (yet fictitious)
compounds such as Limfjors-torsk (‘Limfjord cod’) and Loire-
brie (‘Loire brie’) received mean ratings approaching maximum,
whereas potentially contradictive examples such as Sahara-sild
(‘Sahara herring’) and Amazonas-kylling (‘Amazon(-rainforest)
chicken’) received mean ratings approaching minimum in response
to the question “does the place name refer to the physical origin of
the product (where the product in itself comes from)?” on a five-
point Likert-type scale.
However, in actual life, consumers usually encounter novel
commercial food products and their names in/on packages which
also carry other verbal and visual cues (whether or not further
backed up by more widely distributed consumer-oriented com-
munication, the minimal solution being the low-budget-route
scenario shown in Figure 3.1b). To learn more about the decod-
ing of both novel and established Place-Food compounds in such
more realistic surroundings, a second experiment was conducted
in which Place-Food compounds of both sorts were presented to
participants in a similar setup, but placed on stylized packaging
fronts either supporting or contradicting the pre-contextually pre-
ferred interpretations (which for the established compounds was
set equal to the interpretation naturally following from their con-
ventionalized whole-word meaning as established in an informal
e-mail inquiry among colleagues). Congruent and incongruent
name- context pairings were distributed evenly in a between-groups
design. The contextual framings were created by systematically
varying the key design elements brand name, verbal claim, and
picture on otherwise identical packaging fronts while taking care
not to address the made-in issue directly but merely opening alter-
native paths of interpretation (for further details, see Smith et al.,
2014: 122–124).
Figure 3.2a and 3.2b show the contextual framings used for
supporting and contradicting the pre-contextually preferred
reading of the novel (fictitious) compound name Amazonas-kylling
(‘Amazon (rainforest) chicken’) which in this case was one of
non-origin (if encountered in a Danish supermarket which was the
scenario that the participants were instructed to imagine).
The results showed that not only were such contexts capable
of significantly decreasing/increasing the pre-contextually estab-
lished preferences for/against a physical-origin reading for novel
Naming & Framing at Level 3 49
Figure 3.2 N
ovel Place-Food compound on schematized packaging fronts
(a) supporting and (b) contradicting the pre-contextually pre-
ferred interpretation. In the supporting context, the Danish
verbal claim reads ‘this is what we call free range!’ while the
brand name is conceived in English, suggesting a global (and
environmental) orientation and eliminating the need for trans-
lation here. In the contradicting context, the verbal claim reads
‘with chili, kidney beans, and cilantro’ and the brand name
reads something similar to ‘Easy Saturday.’
50 Naming & Framing at Level 3
(fictitious) compounds; the same was true for established com-
pounds such as Hawaii-pizza (‘Hawaiian pizza’) which is otherwise
hardly ever taken to indicate physical origin in a Danish context
and Samsø-kartofler (‘Samsø potatoes’) which is widely known as a
name for high-quality fresh potatoes actually grown on the island
of Samsø (but which was here alternatively framed as potentially
referring to a pre-prepared potato dish that could be produced
anywhere).
An important implication for real-life food naming and label-
ling practices is that the fairness or potential misleadingness of
concrete naming and labelling solutions can only be realistically
assessed if the total packaging design is taken into account while
also considering consumers’ real-time decoding of it. That is, such
assessments must go substantially beyond what Jones (2014) labels
a “language-centric” view of these issues which tends to dominate
the administrative and legal practices of most countries today (see
also Smith, Møgelvang-Hansen, & Hyldig, 2010).
Furthermore, comparing the rating scores with response times
and registrations of eye movements by means of eye-tracking equip-
ment contributed important leads about the underlying decoding
processes. To mention just a few informative observations: Overall,
participants spent more time looking at the target compounds when
presented in incongruent context than when presented in congruent
ones. However, across all conditions, the mean response latencies
were significantly higher than those registered in the first experi-
ment, indicating that most participants did spent some extra time
looking at the surrounding context, even if that this was not strictly
required for the familiar compounds for which a response could,
in principle, be given by simply fixating the compound and retriev-
ing its well-known whole-word meaning. This can be explained by
the capability of the surrounding design elements, particularly the
large-scale photos, to attract bottom-up (stimulus-driven) attention
automatically by virtue of inherently salient visual features relat-
ing to size, colour contrast, presence of human action, and others
(cf. Orquin & Loose, 2013; Chun & Wolfe, 2008). The picture was
fixated first in the majority of trials and 83.6% looked at least two
other elements apart from the target name, thereby adding new po-
tential candidates for situational sense-making and disambiguation
(relying, for instance, on cognitive mechanisms comparable to those
further discussed in Section 4.5.3 relative to Level 4 framings).
The fact that relatively moderate extra time was nevertheless
spent on compounds presented in congruent contexts (with the
Naming & Framing at Level 3 51
lowest latencies being observed for familiar compounds presented
in such contexts) may, in turn, be plausibly explained by the limited
cognitive effort needed to make sense of the respective elements if
so desired. By contrast, the incongruent contexts had been delib-
erately designed to contradict the pre-contextually most plausible
interpretation which means that – once they had attracted the view-
er’s attention – they were likely to induce a shift from bottom-up
(stimulus-driven) to top-down (goal-driven) attention, i.e. an active
search for a plausible explanation leading to more fixations and
re-fixations and more than one “trip round.” This is consistent with
the significantly higher response latencies registered for both fa-
miliar and novel compounds in these conditions and various trends
observed in the eye-tracking data. For example, relatively more
time was spent on the visually less prominent but potentially more
informative verbal claims and relatively less time on the pictures.
While a full understanding of the decoding processes unfolding
in settings such as the present still lies far ahead, modelling them
experimentally nevertheless adds certain new leads to our current
understanding of what is actually going on. A possible direction
for continued research would be to apply comparable methods to
people’s real-time decoding of temporally and visually more re-
mote framings, say, as encountered when surfing the internet for
additional information during online shopping or comparing party
programs in electoral campaigns. In other words, by encompass-
ing interactive options (see also Ooms et al., 2015), the focus might
be extended from individual communicative products to themat-
ically connected products offering different “packages” of multi-
modal resources to people during transmedial information search,
thus complementing existing research on such processes with a
new type of data (O’Halloran, Tan, & Marissa, 2017; Kim et al.,
2015; Castelló, Morsing, & Schultz, 2013; Giovagnoli, 2011; Darley,
Blankson, & Luethge, 2010).
3.2.2 Control versus Credibility and Effect
The other additional point illustrated by the examples in Figure
3.1a and b is the varying degree of control that interested stake-
holders have over the verbal and visual framing of names that are
important to them, and hence over the meanings that people will
eventually connect with the names. Brand and product naming is
one area where such a control is badly desired by those creating
the names, but not always possible. Another clear example of this
52 Naming & Framing at Level 3
(while fundamentally different in other respects) is professional ter-
minology, but let us start out by considering the brand and product
names discussed in connection with Figure 3.1a and b and extend
the focus to other areas of naming & framing in Section 3.3.
As indicated earlier, the value of a brand name lies not so much
in owning it legally as in the expectations and associations that con-
sumers come to connect with it (see also Maurya & Mishra, 2012;
Rindell, 2008). Both paid and owned media offer brand owners a
high degree of control in that respect (at varying levels of cost, as
discussed earlier), while earned and shared media may substan-
tially increase credibility, but also involve a higher risk of negative
coverage fostering undesired expectations.
For example, when the web medium The Verge at some point
echoed Apple’s own appraisals of their new generation of ARM pro-
cessors for iPhones and iPads, stating that “Apple says it is the most
powerful chip in a smartphone ever,” this is likely to have contributed
new positive expectations to the continued conceptual developments
around the brand name Apple. However, when the very same medium
later approached the issue from a more critical angle, less positive
elements may have been added as well, yet equally powerful due to
the medium’s relatively independent status (cf. Hollister’s, 2020, over-
view of contrasting judgements and data). The same applies, say, to
independent product reviews in YouTube videos and debates in in-
ternet blogs (see also Smith, Fischer, & Yongjian, 2012; Susarla, Oh,
& Tan, 2012). Brand owners thus face the dilemma of either trusting
their products or services to speak for themselves or engaging in ex-
tensive PR and media work, including the establishment of win-win
alliances with (otherwise) independent actors (Granata, Tartagilone,
& Theodosios, 2019; Cui, Lui, & Guo, 2012). While Cavi-Art consis-
tently relies on the former strategy, Apple subtly combines both.
In addition, there are cases where protected brand status is not
even sufficient to restrict the referential use of a name in everyday
speech, let alone any additional expectations. Classic examples are
xerox and jacuzzi which have “grown generic” in many varieties of
English despite their (still valid) status as registered brand names
(see Harrell, 2014 for a continued list). Conversely, many consumers
worldwide still conceive feta as a generic name for a particular type
of (Greek-style) cheese regardless that the name became a protected
designation of origin (PDO) restricted to Greek products in 2002
(cf. MacMaoláin, 2007: 108–119).
In the case of entirely unprotected (generic) product names such
as smartphone and vegan caviar (if not Seaweed Caviar which enjoys
a certain protection as a registered trademark), the array of possible
Naming & Framing at Level 3 53
framings comes even further beyond the control of individual stake-
holders. Yet, such framings may still interfere with their collective
interests. For example, public concerns that smartphones may se-
riously damage children’s physical and mental health (NCI, 2019;
Glatter, 2014) hardly contribute to the positive brand image or sales
figures of any manufacturer of such devices, be it Apple, Samsung,
or Huawei. Related examples are the diverse and sometimes conflict-
ing public framings of names such as e-cigarettes or CO2 emissions
where commercial interests collide with societal concerns about
health protection and climate change (Yates et al., 2015; Avineri &
Waygood, 2013). Importantly, the mapping of such conflicting pub-
lic framings would seem to indicate that they do not only influence
people’s general expectations to the referents, but also their con-
ceptualization of them in terms of number of and balance between
(what we here call) prototypical and essential conceptual compo-
nents (see Section 1.3.1 and Figure 1.2). For example, to some people
e-cigarettes are first and foremost a kind of stimulant that poses a
serious threat to public health, while to others they are an efficient
aid for quitting tobacco smoking. Both positions find some sup-
port in the research literature as echoed in the wider public debate
(Alexander, 2017; Shahab et al., 2017; Yu et al., 2016; Yates et al., 2015).
In turn, becoming aware of such conflicting framings may lead
some recipients to experience the so-called cognitive dissonance,
i.e. emotional and physical discomfort caused by exposure to con-
tradictive information, ideas, and beliefs, a well-documented psy-
chological response to which is to avoid or neglect framings that
are inconsistent with whatever “truth” one has decided to go with
(O’Keefe, 2016: 76–97; Festinger, 1957). In today’s information-
intensive societies, the ultimate consequence is the formation
of what has been labelled (information or filter) bubbles, a term
already mentioned in Section 2.2 as an example of non-arbitrary
naming, i.e. a psychological state characterized by extreme selectiv-
ity with regard to what information, and hence which framings, a
person will allow him- or herself to be exposed to (cf. Nguyen, Hui,
Harper, Terveen, & Konstan, 2014; Resnick, Garrett, Kriplean,
Munson, & Stroud, 2013; Pariser, 2011). We will return to the ethi-
cal implications of these developments in Sections 4.4–4.6.
3.3 Names Negotiated
Taking the discussion beyond the commercial sphere, the examples
just discussed also illustrate the more general circumstance that
people often display different, yet related, understandings of what
54 Naming & Framing at Level 3
a given name means. According to the present framework, such dif-
ferences can be seen as caused by the co-existence of conflicting
contextual framings of the name at Level 3. While the decisive role
of competing framings in people’s comprehension of more complex
subject matters has long been a major concern in the study of naming
& framing processes at (what we here call) Level 4, as further ad-
dressed in Chapter 4, the implications for describing the meaning
of individual names have been less systematically considered. The
issue is largely neglected in mainstream linguistic theorizing as
marginal exceptions to the dominant conception of language(s) as
intersubjectively agreed code(s). However, the frequency of such
“exceptions” has from time to time attracted the interest of other
scholars, in particular philosophers (Devitt & Sterelny, 1999; Pessin
& Goldberg, 1996; Putnam, 1975a,b; Gallie, 1955).
Gallie (1955) thus speaks of essentially contested concepts
conveyed by names such as democracy, fairness, and human rights
(see also Bovaird, 2004; Hobson, Lewis, & Siim, 2002; Garre, 1999).
It is in the very nature of such concepts to be constantly challenged
and (re)negotiated regarding both the exact number and mutual
importance of (what we here call) essential and prototypical
components (see Figure 2.1) and their applicability to real-life cir-
cumstances such as the state of democracy in Turkey or the fairness
of EU immigration policies. Related analyses also seem to apply
to other types of professionally negotiable vocabulary such as the
business term (and buzzword) startup already discussed in Section
2.2. Different authors and practitioners tend to foreground dif-
ferent attributes among those listed in Section 2.2 (and others) as
the most important preconditions for a company to be a genuine
startup (Marius, 2016; Blank & Dorf, 2012; Graham, 2004). And
yet, the pivotal role of the term itself remains the same throughout
these discussions. Another example would be the diverse framings
of the term framing in language and communication research (see
e.g. Entman, 1993, and this book).
Speaking of naming more generally, Putnam (1975a; see also
1975b) suggests a hypothesis of “division of linguistic labour”5
5 Putnam presents his hypothesis as part of a larger argument in defence of the
much-debated philosophical position that the reference of a name can be dealt
with independently of “intangible” psychological variables such as concepts
and thoughts. However, as demonstrated also by e.g. Keil, Stein, Webb, Bill-
ings, & Rozenblit (2008), Geeraerts, (2006), and Lakoff (1987), the argument
as such is not inconsistent with a cognitivist position which accepts the human
Naming & Framing at Level 3 55
according to which people collaborate on knowing (different frag-
ments of) the meaning of the words they use. It is assumed that
ordinary language users connect many words only with vague and
incomplete concepts (or “stereotypes”) which are however sufficient
for ensuring successful communication in a great many instances.
Whenever in doubt, they will however leave the final judgement to
those members of society who have been granted the status of “ex-
perts” of the domain in question. For example, most people who
use the word gold are not able to determine if something is really
gold or not. Yet if an expert tells somebody that whatever (s)he has
been referring to as gold is actually something else, the person will
(hopefully) stop using that name. Likewise, many of us know that a
wombat is some kind of animal that lives in Australia and that foie
gras is a celebrated French culinary speciality, but would still leave
it to an expert to decide if the name applies in concrete instances.
One among several potential objections to Putnam’s argument
(see also e.g. Geeraerts, 2006; Pessin & Goldberg, 1996) is that it
does not distinguish between “division of linguistic labour” and
plain polysemy, i.e. the fact that some words can have different but
related meanings, including specialized meaning(s) in professional
language (see also Sager, 1990). For example, most speakers of
English distinguish trees from plants, and in this case a biologist’
claim that a tree is actually a type of plant will hardly affect the use
of these names in everyday speech. Another complication is that
experts may also disagree among themselves (as we saw it earlier
with e-cigarettes and startups) and that different categories of ex-
perts may resort to different types of criteria for determining the
exact reference of the same name, yielding different results. Thus,
to a chemist (at work), gold is first and foremost an element (Au)
with specific chemical properties, whereas to a jeweller (at work) it
is mostly a category of alloys containing Au but also other metals
used for making jewellery. It is thus not necessarily given in ad-
vance which experts will be the most relevant to consult in which
situations, or whether individual language users will consult any
experts at all.
mind (and, for some, the brain) as valid and methodologically accessible objects
of scientific inquiry. From such a position, Putnam’s observations provide an
excellent framework for addressing certain evident gaps in the analysis of lexi-
cal meanings as intersubjectively valid entities that have largely been neglected
in mainstream language theory but noted by others (see also e.g. Gee, 2015:
24–29 for a social-linguistically founded argument going in the same direction).
56 Naming & Framing at Level 3
None of this alters the basic observation that, in some cases,
different framings of a name at Level 3 will not result in classic
polysemy, but in a state of asymmetric interdependence between
the meanings connected with the name by different individuals.
Transposed to rhetoric terms (McCroskey, 2016: 82–107; Carey,
1994), the authority (ethos) of some language users may influence
the propositional content (logos) and emotional load (pathos) that
other people come to convey and disseminate further by using the
name, yet without being able to formulate the underlying criteria
or foreseeing the total range of implication themselves (as to the
emotional dimension, see also Lecheler, Bos, & Vliegenthart, 2015).
A way of encompassing this circumstance into the analysis of
conceptual structure given in Section 1.3.1 (see Figure 1.2) would
be to describe ordinary language users’ “versions” of the concepts
in question as containing a number of empty slots for which only
experts can provide the relevant fillers (to state it in slot/filler terms,
e.g. Busse, 2017; Ran & Duimering, 2010; Gagné & Spalding, 2006).
In the case of smartphone analysed in Figure 1.2 in Section 1.3.1, for
example, most users of the name are hardly aware that such devices
must contain a CPU (central processing unit) and AD and DA con-
verters in order to operate, even though they are likely to expect
that there must be some kind of advanced electronic circuits inside
that make the thing work. However, to people who have that addi-
tional knowledge, it will not only be part of, but count as essential
components in their “version” of the concept in question. The latter
circumstance is indicated by the grey-toned elements in Figure 1.2.
Likewise, many people are aware that genuine foie gras has to
meet some kind of criteria in terms of taste, texture, origin, method
of preparation, etc. (corresponding to empty conceptual slots
which in this case relate to both sensory and propositional infor-
mation), but specifying the adequate fillers is, again, left to trusted
experts. Furthermore, in a case like gold even the basic nature of the
additional information required to fill the (presumable) slots may
remain fuzzy to many language users so that the division of linguis-
tic labour ultimately comes down to a conceptual component that
could be described as <category membership must be confirmed by
a societally authorized expert>.
In cases such as smartphone, foie gras, and gold, the sensitivity to
experts’ final judgements is likely to come down to factors such as
expectations to functionality and to social prestige and price. How-
ever, it is less intuitively clear if Putnam’s predictions would also
Naming & Framing at Level 3 57
hold, say, for hotdog, hipster, or fake news where the body of poten-
tial “experts” is more heterogeneous and people might ultimately
prefer to rely on their own judgements. What is clearly needed
here is harder empirical evidence on the degree to which compet-
ing framings of a name may interfere with each other even on the
level of one and the same individual’s understanding and use of that
name under varying conditions.
A first step in that direction was taken in an in-depth quantita-
tive and qualitative review of 821 Danish legal disputes on allegedly
misleading food naming and labelling (Møgelvang-Hansen, 2010;
Smith et al., 2009). The review showed that ordinary consumers,
culinary experts, NGO activists, food manufacturers, and gov-
ernment officials resort to very different criteria and sources of
information when judging whether a concrete product lives up to
the name under which it is sold and qualifies, say, as real mead,
macaroons, surimi shrimps, or a smoothie (none of the categories
mentioned being covered by legally enforceable food standards). In
a follow-up experimental study (Smith et al., 2013) it was demon-
strated that pre-exposure to authoritative definitions (as compared
to a taste-samples-only and a taste-samples-plus-written-product-
facts condition) significantly affected consumers’ typicality judge-
ments of alternative taste samples for a traditional Danish bakery
product such as makroner (≈ ‘macaroons’), but had no significant
effect in the case of smoothies where consumers seemed to rely on
their own (no less critical) judgements.
Such results lend partial empirical support to Putnam’s hypothe-
sis, taking the issue beyond decades of philosophical hair-splitting,
while also offering some indications of its scope and limitations.
Related test setups might prove applicable to other communicative
domains involving a wider range of contextual framings, say, to as-
sess the degree to which professional stakeholders’ contributions to
the public debate affect ordinary citizens’ understanding and use
of terms such as sustainable consumption, climate justice, or cyber-
security under varying conditions. That is: Can the concepts that
individual people connect with such terms be described as cogni-
tively consistent at least for each single individual at a given mo-
ment in time (while still varying between individuals and open to
external influence and gradual evolution), or might a more realistic
description be to see them as fractioned samples of potentially self-
contradictory (dissonant) conceptual content even in the mind of
the single individual?
58 Naming & Framing at Level 3
3.4 Is the Name Wrong or Is the World Going Wrong?
A final implication of the existence of competing framings at Level
3 is their role in the emergence of what was referred to as substitute
names in Section 2.2, i.e. in deliberate attempts to re-name things
that have a name already. The demand for such names is often pre-
sented in the Joyce-principle vein, i.e. as a desire to find a name that
“says” something better (or worse, if negative framing is the pur-
pose) than known alternatives, e.g. sex worker (which offers more
explicit support for claiming societal legitimacy than prostitute) or
information war (which sounds more disturbing than strategic com-
munications); see Section 2.2 for further details.
However, in some cases, the need for a new name rather seems to
be rooted in previous framings of the existing alternative(s) at Level
3, i.e. in the Juliet principle. For example, both African American
and black American are relatively broadly accepted as demographic
designations in modern US English (for possible reasons for prefer-
ring one or the other, see Harris, 2014; Agyemang, Bhopa, & Brui-
jnzeels, 2005), whereas negro is nowadays ethically and politically
entirely unacceptable. Yet, this hardly comes down to the original
motivations of the respective names, considering that negro means
‘black’ in Spanish. The situation is however amply explained by the
offensive and inhumane utterances and actions that have accom-
panied the latter name earlier in the US history (and, alas, some-
times do even today); see Painter (2006) for a historical account.
Likewise, earlier layers of framings may explain why persuasion
is now preferred to the (once quite uncontroversial) name propa-
ganda when speaking, say, of health promotion or election cam-
paigns, notwithstanding that propaganda literally means ‘to spread
or propagate something’ which, arguably, sounds less manipulative
than persuading one’s audience (for further discussion on the socie-
tal evaluations and history of these terms, see Jowett & O’Donnell,
2018). In short, what may ultimately need change are some people’s
conceptualizations of and attitudes towards whatever a name de-
notes, not the name as such. In that respect, substituting the name
can only play an auxiliary (but still important) part, while any final
settlement of the matter depends on framings at Level 3 which are
determined by broader developments in society at large.
4 Naming & Framing
at Level 4
The Lexical Toolbox of
Issues Management and Its
Multimodal Surroundings
4.1 Beyond the Meaning of Individual Names
Examples like those considered in Section 3.4 lead us further to
naming & framing at Level 4. When it comes to more complex sub-
ject matters such as the societal status and rights of ethnic groups
or moral and political limits to public campaigning, the contextual
framings of interest not only shape our understanding of individ-
ual names (though essential parts of such framings may be encap-
sulated in a single name as we have just seen; this point is taken
further in Section 4.3) but also affect the way we determine what
is good or bad, right or wrong, relevant or irrelevant, an asset or a
threat, and so on, relative to a wider subject taken as a whole and to
various more specific issues within it.1
In both respects, the effect is achieved through the communica-
tor’s choice of (other) words that lead recipients’ thoughts and emo-
tions in particular directions, as further supported by non-verbal
cues such as photos and graphics and/or immediate sensory contact
with whatever is referred to, as discussed in Chapter 3 for single
names. Such multimodal framings thus (also) play a vital role when
a broader subject and its sub-issues are identified and assessed, that
is, as a tool for issues management in a broad sense of the term (for
a more specific usage in PR, see Section 4.2).
The totality of semiotic resources used for communicat-
ing about a given subject are also referred to as a discourse in
some research traditions, yet with some variation in definition,
1 As we shall soon see, the sub-issues of interest may ultimately be as specific as
the nutritional value of a particular food product and the Level 4 framing come
down to the choice of a single word or word-picture combination. However, from
the perspective taken in this chapter, the question is not what the word means or
what the picture depicts as such, but how choosing them in preference to other
options in a particular communicative context for conveying a particular mes-
sage may affect recipients’ beliefs and feelings about the sub-issue in question.
60 Naming & Framing at Level 4
methodological approaches, and research foci (Jones, 2017; Maut-
ner, 2016; Fairclough, 2013; Widdowson, 1995; Tannen, 1993); other
influential frameworks, however, approach otherwise closely related
matters in different terms (e.g. Entman, 1993; Goffman, 1974). To
maintain the cross-disciplinary dialogue aimed at from the outset,
we will therefore abstain from simply equating the study of naming &
framing at Level 4 to discourse analysis (though, in many respects, it
is), considering also that the points that need to be made may equally
well be accommodated by choosing the appropriate one among more
particular terms such as issues, contexts, domains, and modalities.
To take yet an example of conflicting framings, focusing now
at Level 4 and on global politics rather than on product naming
and branding: If a news medium (say, Fox News) quotes the US
authorities for having proof that the Syrian regime has carried out
a chemical weapon attack against civilians accompanied by pictures
of children receiving urgent medical treatment, this tells one story.
If another news medium (say, Russia Today) quotes Russian au-
thorities for having proof that an alleged chemical attack was staged
and filmed in Syria by collaborators of foreign intelligence services
to discredit the Syrian government, accompanied by a photo of a
seemingly unharmed boy who was (allegedly) among the victims
shown in the film, this tells a different story. Some news reports
have attempted to cover both angels while displaying a varying
degree of confidence in the sources available (Wintour, MacAs-
kill, Borger, & Chrisafis, 2018; BBC News, 2018). In this respect,
the example also illustrates the complicated interplay between the
original outlets of such framings (here: governments) and their dis-
semination in earned, shared, paid, and owned media, as discussed
at some length in 3.2ff for commercial messages (for more examples
and evidence pertaining to global politics, see Hammond, 2018;
Ojala, Pantti, & Kangas, 2017; Powell, 2017; Pollack, 2004).
4.2 A Fractured Paradigm: Entman and Later
Developments
“Framing” in the present sense, with or without the addition of
“naming,” is probably the most extensively addressed phenome-
non among those investigated under that heading in the research
literature up till now. A wide variety of partially overlapping the-
oretical paradigms have contributed to the topic. These span from
overarching philosophical agendas, in particular that of social con-
structivism (Scheufele, 1999; Brown, 1995) which also entails the
fundamental question of whether an “objective” reality beyond our
Naming & Framing at Level 4 61
framings of it exists at all (a discussion which is however beyond the
scope of the present work), through various directions of sociology
(Vliegenthar & van Zoonen, 2011; Goffman, 1974), cognitive and
social psychology (Fiske & Taylor, 2013; Nelson, Oxley, & Clawson,
1997; Loftus & Palmer, 1974), linguistically and sociologically ori-
ented discourse analysis (Jones, 2017; Mautner, 2016; Fairclough,
2013; Tannen, 1993), and cognitive linguistics and pragmatics (Fau-
connier & Tuner, 2003; Verschueren, 1998) to rhetoric (Lynch &
Zoller, 2015) and anthropology (Hoeyer, 2005). During the latest
years, a shift has furthermore taken place from mostly seeing (what
we here call) Level 4 framings as an essentially language-driven en-
deavour to also considering the effect of combining different semi-
otic modalities into multimodal wholes (Powell, Boomgaarden, de
Swert, & de Vreese, 2019; Forceville, 2014; Jones, 2014).
The diversity is equally rich when it comes to methodological
approaches and combinations of such (Elish & Boyd, 2018; O’Hal-
loran, Tan, Pham, Bateman, & Vande Moere, 2018; Bail, 2014;
Bruni, Tran, & Baroni, 2014) and to areas of practical application
(as reviewed in Section 0.1). Notably, the latter include issues man-
agement in a more specific PR-strategic sense, referring to com-
panies’ and other actors’ ongoing monitoring of and, if need be,
proactive intervention with public framings that may potentially
interfere with their strategic interests (Heath & Palenchar, 2008;
Crable & Vibbert, 1985). A partially related, while often more nega-
tively loaded, conception is that of spin or spin doctoring (Miller &
Dinan, 2008; Esser, Reinemann, & Fan, 2000).
In sum, the picture is rather heterogenous. However, in an influ-
ential early study, Entman (1993) argues that instead of seeing the
(already then) fractured nature of framing research as a drawback,
this ostensive weakness could be turned into a strength by iden-
tifying and more clearly defining the common core that evidently
runs through most existing treatments of the subject. This renders
contributions from a variety of complementary disciplines both
welcome and necessary. Pursuing this goal, Entman suggests that to
frame is to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them
more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote
a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evalua-
tion, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993: 52; author’s
original italics).2 It might be added that even if the emphasis in the
2 Entman thus applies the term salient in a somewhat broader sense than the one
adopted in Section 1.3.2, namely for referring to the perceived importance and/
or prominence of particular aspects of a given wider subject matter, whereas in
62 Naming & Framing at Level 4
passage quoted is on “text” and hence words, in subsequent work,
Entman stresses the potential contribution of non-verbal (visual)
framings to the final outcome (Entman, 2003; 2004), thus taking a
multimodal perspective concordant with that adopted in the pres-
ent work (see also e.g. Powell et al., 2019; Meijers, Remmelswaal, &
Wonneberger, 2018).
Despite all later developments, Entman’s (1993) definition remains
widely acknowledged and cited as an operational point of departure
for continued investigation of (what we here call) naming & framing
at Level 4 (16.714 citations registered in Google Scholar so far3). What
has followed is a continued diversification and refinement of concrete
framing techniques (agenda setting, use of selective comparisons, re-
and counter-framings, storytelling, strategic use of metaphors, and so
on) and extensions of such techniques to still new fields. Both aspects
are amply covered in the existing literature on (what we call) naming
& framing at Level 4 as summarized in Section 0.1 and above. What
the present work might add, then, is some further elaboration on two
essential topics which are also raised by Entman (1993) yet with no
claim of an exhaustive treatment.
The first topic is how naming & framing processes on (what we
here call) Level 4 connect to (what we here call) naming & framing
processes at Levels 1 and 3, as mediated by Level 2. The second
topic is the ethical implications that emerge from the still more
extensive and professionalized use of framing techniques in public
space. We will consider these topics in turn.
4.3 Understanding the Full Ecosystem of
Naming & Framing
Elaborating on an observation by Gamson (1992), Entman notes
that “a frame can exert great social power when embedded in a term
[…]” and continues:
Once a term is widely accepted, to use another is to risk that
target audiences will perceive the communicator as lacking
Section 1.3.2 (and below) it refers to comparable qualities of concepts for cate-
gories of individual entities which bring them “first in line” for being provided
with a single name. Both points are essential to the present discussion and the
respective uses of the term are not mutually exclusive, but deserve brief mention
for clarity.
3 URL: https://scholar.google.dk/scholar?hl=da&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=entman+
1993&btnG (accessed June 2020).
Naming & Framing at Level 4 63
credibility – or will even fail to understand what the commu-
nicator is talking about. Thus the power of a frame can be as
great as that of language itself
(1993: 55; my italics, VS)
This observation elegantly summarizes the key argument pursued
throughout the preceding chapters of this book regarding naming
& framing at Levels 1–3 with implications also for Level 4.
As already argued, tentative conceptualizations of whatever is
ultimately provided with a name are likely to have a salient status
in the minds of some people even before a name is suggested (fol-
lowing Barsalou’s dynamic understanding of human categorization
as presented in Section 1.3.2); yet, the cognitive and communicative
impact of the content ultimately lexicalized can be substantially
increased by the very fact of it being enrolled into something as
seemingly objective and indisputable as human language (see also
the discussion of linguistic relativism in Section 1.2). All four levels
of naming & framing both contribute to and are affected by these
processes.
To revisit a case considered earlier: What is known as sleep
hygiene today would hardly have become a distinct medical field
without “having a name for it” (at Level 1); yet, that name has like-
wise contributed to shaping the scientific and public understand-
ing of the wider subject of sleeping disorders, as supported also
by other keywords such as sleep cycle, bedtime routines, powernap,
sleep apnea, and CPAP treatment accompanied by visual and other
immediate sensory cues (lending themselves to analysis at Level 4).
In turn, the meanings of each of these names – and of sleeping dis-
orders and sleep hygiene, for that matter when taken as names of the
overall subjects – have been shaped by the verbal and non-verbal
contextual cues surrounding them in ongoing communication
(shifting the focus back to Level 3). Moreover, in some cases, con-
flicting framings may lead different people to understand the same
names in somewhat different ways (requiring further analysis at
Level 3, but with potential implications also for Level 4). For exam-
ple, experts disagree on the exact period of time required for a short
sleep to be a physiologically beneficial powernap and this may have
important implications also for peoples’ comprehension of sleeping
strategies in other respects. In all that, the built-in motivation of
the names involved (Level 2) may either support the understanding
intended by the initial communicators, as sleep hygiene seems to
have succeeded to do in the present example, or obscure it as when
64 Naming & Framing at Level 4
the Danish government launched a new initiative under the name
betalingsring (lit. ≈ ‘payment ring’) where e.g. miljøring (lit. ≈ ‘ecor-
ing’) might have done a better job; see Section 2.2.
A perhaps more broadly comprehensible example which has
furthermore been subject to extensive investigation from a declared
framing perspective is climate change (Poberezhskaya & Ashe,
2018; Drews & van den Bergh, 2016; O’Brien, Eriksen, Nygaard,
& Schjolden, 2007). Despite the seemingly transparent and unbi-
ased morphological motivation of that name, what it denotes (and
ultimately “really means”) has been framed and counter-framed
by interested actors as everything from a here-and-now threat to
life in Earth to ideologically motivated fiction (for an overview of
some extremes flourishing in the current debates, see Grist, 2020).
In turn, these framings also involve other names such as global
warming, greenhouse gasses, CO2 footprint, climate negligence, cli-
mate denial, and climate lobbyism presented in combination with
non-verbal cues such as images and films of climatic phenomena,
statistics presented in tables and graphs, eyewitness reports, and so
on. The exact understanding of these names and other cues, on the
other hand, is in itself highly dependent on the framings in which
they occur and how communicators use them for framing each
other.
Figure 4.1 shows a somewhat simplistic but hopefully illustrative
visualization of the interplay between all four levels of naming &
framing in relation to the topic (and name) climate change, expand-
ing on the right-hand part of Figure 0.1.
In sum, the four levels of naming & framing suggested in this
book are intimately connected and in constant interplay with each
other, forming what might be called an ecosystem of naming &
framing processes. Like any ecosystem, it remains in a state of per-
manent evolution which, to a wide extent, is driven by competition
between its current elements.
The latter point connects further to Entman’s considerations
about target audiences. Depending on what “camp” one is in, us-
ing a particular name and/or displaying different understandings
of the same name may influence the communicator’s credibility
with a given audience or even eliminate his or her chances of be-
ing understood at all. Apart from climate change, clear examples of
this are premenstrual syndrome, e-cigarettes, and information war,
which were all discussed earlier. The ultimate consequence is the
formation of what some authors call information (or filter) bubbles
as supported by such psychological mechanisms as avoidance of
Naming & Framing at Level 4 65
Figure 4.1 T
he full ecosystem of naming and faming processes illustrated
by the current climate change debate.
cognitive dissonance; see Sections 2.2, 3.2.2, and 4.5. What the pres-
ent analysis may add to these insights is that the struggle for defi-
nitional power in public space, even when it comes to single words,
seems to continue within the mind of each single individual. This
adds new relevance to what was predicted by Putnam’s (1975a,b)
hypothesis of division of linguistic labour and finds partial empir-
ical support in experimental findings so far restricted to the sphere
of food naming (Smith et al., 2013) but with potential implications
also for other societal domains; see Section 3.3. For a related point
formulated from a somewhat different philosophical standpoint,
see Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan (2018: 283–310).
4.4 Implications for Communicative Ethics
and Fairness
The above considerations lead us further to the issue of commu-
nicative ethics. Entman and many other authors with him take a
critical stance on the competitive advantages that powerful com-
municators, whether political or commercial, tend to gain over less
powerful ones in diffusing interest-driven framings, and the poor
job that (some) news media and other expectable watchdogs of the
general public allegedly do to ensure a better balance (Entman,
2007; 2004; 2003; 1993: 55–57; see also e.g. Kabel, 2017; Kellner, 2015;
Reese, 2010; Miller & Dinan, 2008; Kumar, 2006; Druckman &
66 Naming & Framing at Level 4
Parkin, 2005; Pollack, 2004; for a business perspective, see also e.g.
Jones, 2014; Bone & France, 2001; Balasubramanian, 1994). Since
the 1990s, the rise of the Internet and the social media has opened
new opportunities for a better balanced and more critical interac-
tion, but also new pitfalls, including a still more blurring border-
line between paid, earned, shared, and owned media (Knüpfer &
Entman, 2018; Macnamara, Lwin, Adi, & Zerfass, 2016) in a still
more polyphonic media landscape (Castelló, Morsing, & Schultz,
2013); see also Section 3.2.2.
As a response to these developments, professional communi-
cators and their organizations tend to put still more emphasis on
responsible conduct and self-regulation adhering to criteria such as
truthfulness, transparency, accountability, and compliance with le-
gal regulations (PRSA, 2018; CIPR, 2018). Concordantly, the body
of national and supranational legislation directly addressing the
borderline between fair and potentially misleading communica-
tion is also growing, in particular with regard to commercial com-
municative practices such as advertising, product labelling, and
e- commerce. However, legislators and courts have also repeatedly
been criticized for prioritizing immediately measurable criteria
such as documentation of factual correctness while neglecting the
more subtle communicative pitfalls that emerge from the psycholog-
ical specifics of human information processing and decision-mak-
ing (Jones, 2014; Trzaskowski, 2011; Smith, Møgelvang-Hansen, &
Hyldig, 2010; Incardona & Poncibò, 2007; Wansink & Shandon,
2006; Bone & France, 2001).
For example, in a critical analysis of the Unfair Commercial
Practices Directive (UCPD, 2005/29/EC) which constitutes the reg-
ulatory foundation of consumer-oriented business communications
and sales promotion in the European Union, Trzaskowski, (2011)
substantiates at some length that the provisions of the UCPD and,
even more so, the detailed legislation and court practices imple-
menting them canonize an idealized understanding of the notorious
benchmark character labelled “the average consumer.” Disclosing
a strong influence from economic theorizing, the result is a con-
sistently rational Homo Economicus who is assumed to compare
the value of all options faced in daily life and then follow the best
possible path of action. Trzakowski argues that these expectations
are directly contradicted by an extensive body of empirical research
on consumer behaviour and human decision-making (to which we
return shortly) which suggests that people routinely compromise
on their rationality under influence of factors such as limitations
Naming & Framing at Level 4 67
in time and cognitive capacity, degree of perceived importance, re-
liance on repetitions, spontaneous emotional responses, and so on
(see also Gidlöf, Wallin, Holmqvist, & Møgelvang-Hansen, 2013;
Kahneman, 2011; Ariely, 2008; Incardona & Poncibò, 2007). Trza-
kowski argues that such insights can be and will eventually need to
be better accommodated in running legislative and administrative
practices. However, considering that the whole issue is only grad-
ually beginning to emerge as a discussion topic in its own right in
the mainstream legal literature, no quick fix seems to be in sight at
present (cf. Conradie, 2016: 4).
What is perhaps more striking, and potentially a bit disturbing,
is the fact that professional communicators’ emphasis on criteria
such as truthfulness, transparency, etc. (see above) is equally in-
sufficient to cope with the challenge. Professional communicators
should be the first to know that factually correct information can
be presented (framed) in ways that support interest-driven inter-
pretations at the expense of other, equally plausible ones, and that
knowing and trusting a source do not guarantee that it will always
tell you the only conceivable story or one that all interested parties
would consider to be the most relevant one. Several examples dis-
cussed so far illustrate this (for further discussion, see also Dynel,
2016; Carson, 2016). What tends to get lost in the debate about
law and ethics, then, is the existence of obvious psychological rea-
sons why framing works, both with ordinary citizens and expect-
able watchdogs of the public, and that the very fact of being able
to control these mechanisms is an integral part of the professional
competence and job descriptions of strategic communicators at the
operational level. Before taking these considerations further, let us
therefore briefly sum up some of the most widely recognized mech-
anisms involved, and also consider how communicators’ concrete
choices of verbal and non-verbal communicative means are likely
to interact with them.
4.5 Why Framing Works
At the risk of oversimplification, the psychological mechanisms of
relevance can be subsumed under two main headings: reliance on
stereotypes and a tendency towards mental shortcuts. Both have
been approached from a variety of theoretical end empirical per-
spectives and with great variations in terminology. We will consider
them, in turn, and, on that background, introduce the approach of
relevance theory (RT) which connects the cognitive consequences
68 Naming & Framing at Level 4
of the mechanisms mentioned more directly to communicators’
choice and combination of multimodal communicative resources.
4.5.1 Stereotype Thinking
It is well documented that the immense complexity of perceived
reality leads people to resort to stereotypes4 of various sorts, i.e.
simplified mental “templates” which summarize past experiences
for future use, be it when ordering food in a restaurant, discuss-
ing home duties with teenagers, or evaluating candidates for an
election. Different manifestations of these mechanisms have been
investigated in further depth under a variety of headings such as
stereotypes (Fiske & Taylor, 2013; Hilton & von Hippel, 1996), men-
tal models (Fairhurst, 2011; Johnson-Laird, 2006), scripts (Singh,
Barry, & Liu, 2004; Schank, 1999), schemas (or schemata) (Hampe &
Grady, 2005; Rumelhart, 1980), narratives (Rideout, 2008; Bruner,
Hinchman, & Hinchman, 1997), and, indeed, frames (Cienki, 2007;
Kittay & Lehrer, 1992). The latter use of the term frame thus adds
yet another layer to its inherent ambiguity in that it both covers the
communicative means used for activating a particular (stereotypi-
cal) understanding of a given situation and that understanding it-
self (for a clear separation of the two uses of the term, see Scheufele,
1999). Successful framing (in the sense of choice of communicative
means) thus often relies on activating one set of stereotypical ex-
pectations at the expense of others, leaving the remaining gaps to
be filled out by the recipients, thus unknowingly finishing the job of
the communicator. To take an example of a less fortunate decision
in that regard considered a couple of times earlier: The failure of
the Danish political initiative termed betalingsring (lit. ≈ ‘payment
ring’) can be explained as an unintentional activation of the stereo-
type ‘politicians seeking new tax revenues’ instead of the intended
Naming & Framing at Level 4 69
‘politicians responding to environmental challenges,’ as triggered,
in this case, by the morphological motivation of the name itself (i.e.
by naming & framing at Level 2, but with consequences also for
Levels 3 and 4).
4.5.2 Mental Shortcuts
The effect can be further enhanced by mental shortcuts. In our
daily lives, we are confronted with an abundance of choices, and
dealing exhaustingly with each of them far exceeds our mental ca-
pacity (Kahneman, 2011; Schwartz, 2004; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
We are therefore predisposed to elaborate more on some decisions
than on others depending on their perceived importance.
One much quoted theoretical framework that addresses this
phenomenon in operational terms is the elaboration likelihood
model first proposed by Petty & Cacioppo (1986; see O’Keefe, 2016:
148–175 for further developments). The model distinguishes between
a central processing route for high-involvement decision-making
(say, buying a house or undergoing risky surgery) where complex
information is actively sought and compared, and a peripheral
route for low-involvement decision-making (say, buying a frozen
dinner or deciding whether to believe in tabloid media’s accusations
of sexual harassment against some less known politician) where the
decision-making is based on a smaller number of random cues such
as attractive packaging design, a single convincing argument, or
plain trust in the communicator. In turn, this paves the ground for
so-called halo effects (Forgas, & Laham, 2016; Chandon & Wan-
sink, 2007; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), i.e. unwarranted additional
inferences consistent with the positive or negative judgement ini-
tially derived from the cues actually considered (say, expecting that
a product which carries an organic-farming label is also low on
fat or that a politician accused of sexual harassment must be an
anti-feminist).
4.5.3 A Quest for Situational Relevance
While the generation of such potentially misguided inferences on
the background of factually not incorrect (but often scarce) infor-
mation has been extensively observed and described (see also e.g.
Peterson & Palmer, 2017; Lähteenmäki et al., 2010; Roe, Levy, &
Derby, 1999), fewer frameworks take the analysis beyond acknowl-
edging, on a generic level, the important role played by psychological
70 Naming & Framing at Level 4
mechanisms such as those mentioned in determining the final out-
come. That is, the observations are not always followed up by more
detailed hypothesizing about exactly which justified or misguided
(including deliberately misleading) inferences a communicator may
induce in the recipient by choosing particular constellations of ver-
bal and non-verbal communicative means in preference to others
for conveying the intended message.
A possible scheme for such an operational analysis is offered by RT
which was originally proposed by Sperber & Wilson (1995; see also Wil-
son & Sperber, 2012) with a primary focus on the implicit dimension
of sense-making during interpersonal language-based communica-
tion, but later transposed also to the analysis of mass communication
and the interplay between visual and verbal communicative resources
(Forceville, 2014, 2008; Cummings, 2013; Taillard, 2000).
The gist of the theory is that any information that a communi-
cator brings to the communicative scene will be expected by the
recipient5 to be relevant to the situation in which it is uttered in
one way or another. If the relevance is not clear to the recipient
from what is said explicitly (called explicatures in RT terminology),
(s)he will initiate a subconscious process of step-by-step relevance
processing by matching the explicit information with information
already accessible to him or her while tentatively adding (inferring)
pieces of new information at his/her own risk that might establish
a sensible connection between the two (called implicatures in RT
terminology, i.e. presumed messages not explicitly articulated by
the communicator). Stated more plainly, the recipient will try to
answer the question “why are you telling me this?” until some plau-
sible explanation comes to mind. The process stops when the cost
of additional relevance processing exceeds the expected cognitive
benefit in terms of new knowledge that can be used efficiently in the
situation. In low-involvement settings such as everyday shopping
or reading gossip pages, that point can be expected to be reached
relatively fast (see Section 4.5.2). Moreover, different recipients may
have access to different types and levels of knowledge, yielding
equally different results (see Figure 4.2a and b).
Naming & Framing at Level 4 71
Figure 4.2 Relevance processing: the case of wine gum.
72 Naming & Framing at Level 4
To illustrate, let us once again consider the condensed “cocktails”
of semiotic resources found on product packages. In an authentic
legal dispute (among the 821 cases covered by the case review pre-
sented in Smith, Clement, Møgelvang-Hansen, & Selsøe Sørensen,
2011; see also Møgelvang-Hansen, 2010), the visually highlighted
claim Kun 0,3% fedt pr. 100 g (‘Only 0.3% fat per 100 g’) on the front
of a pack of wine gum was ultimately banned by the Danish food
authorities because it was considered likely that consumers would
expect the product to contain less fat than other types of wine gum
which was not the case. However, throughout the proceedings, the
manufacturer insisted that the relevant comparison (if any) was not
with wine gum at all, but with other types of sweets among which,
say, chocolate or marzipan contain much more fat. Characteristi-
cally, the case was never subject to any empirical testing (see also
Section 4.4), but the relevance-theoretical approach allows us to hy-
pothesize a bit further on the validity of the respective arguments.
Thus, a consumer with minimal knowledge of health and
nutrition issues (classified as a weak consumer in some contexts)
may well stop the relevance processing at the point suggested in
Figure 4.2a and be utterly misled. By contrast, a consumer with
more extensive knowledge of health and nutrition issues (classified
as a strong consumer in the same contexts) is likely to continue
the relevance processing beyond that point. Indeed, (s)he is likely
to reach a conclusion similar to the one allegedly intended by the
manufacturer all along. However, this does not necessarily mean
that the consumer will also take the line of action that the manu-
facturer might have hoped for. In having access to extensive and
diverse knowledge of food and nutrition issues, the consumer may
continue his or her decision-making in several directions, including
the one suggested in Figure 4.2b. None of this alters the circum-
stance that a less knowledgeable, or simply less involved, recipient
will be at a substantial risk of being misled. Provision of harder em-
pirical evidence to underpin legal decisions in such grey-zone cases
is thus an obvious subject for further research, and experimental
work along these lines is presently in progress.
Another issue relative to which RT would seem to have a not
yet fully fulfilled explanatory potential is the question of how
situational inference-making triggered by images differs from that
triggered by words (cf. Forceville, 2014, 2008). As earlier observed
by Messaris (1997), a key difference between picture-based and
language-based communication is that pictures are propositionally
Naming & Framing at Level 4 73
(syntactically) indeterminate, that is, they may well refer to some-
thing beyond themselves (by resembling it, i.e. as an instance of
iconicity), but lack the formal means to make explicit propositional
statements about that something that could be assessed in terms of
true or false. Take a photo of a pile of fresh raspberries as compared
to the verbal statement “contains 0,2% raspberry concentrate” on
a tub of yoghurt.
As a consequence, any situational decoding of pictures must
ultimately rely on ad-hoc inference-making (i.e. a search for im-
plicatures to state it in the RT terms mentioned earlier) since no
explicit statements (explicatures) can be conveyed by a picture in
the first place. However, Forceville (2014) argues that a two-layered
analysis is nevertheless both possible and required, illustrating his
point by a cartoon panel (containing no words) from a Tintin story
by Hergé. What one sees immediately can thus still be transposed
into an explicit propositional statement such as “Tintin and Snowy
walk toward a hut in a forest” (corresponding to the level of explica-
tures in language-based communication). However, to grasp what
exactly that information contributes to the overall story, additional
inferences are needed (corresponding to the level of implicatures in
language-based communication).
To return once again to the communicative impact of prod-
uct packaging design: It is widely assumed by the authorities and
courts of many countries that a photo of a potentially taste-giving
ingredient shown on the packaging of a food product will lead
consumers to expect that the taste in question stems (primarily)
from that ingredient and not from artificial flavouring, rendering
the opposite case one of potentially misleading food labelling. By
contrast, judgements tend to be more liberal if the corresponding
taste is “only” suggested by isolated words such as raspberry or sour
cream & onion or by a stylized drawing.6 An experimental study
74 Naming & Framing at Level 4
designed to shed empirical light on these pre-theoretical assump-
tions (Smith, Barratt, & Sørensen, 2015) demonstrated that the
presence of a photo did indeed enhance consumers’ expectations
about the natural origin of the taste in question to a small, but
statistically significant, degree. However, the effect of product type
was far more prominent. The participants were more optimistic
about finding real beef in beef bouillon than about finding real
fruit in fruit candy, photo or not. Furthermore, participants with a
relatively low level of knowledge on food and nutrition issues (as-
sessed in a separate questionnaire) tended to be more optimistic
about naturalness in general than those with a higher knowledge
level.
Forceville’s (2014) approach offers some additional leads to
explaining such findings. To start with the level of close-to-
propositional “literal” readings (corresponding to explicatures
in language-based communication), the circumstance that the
pictures in fact did have an effect on some participants even for
expectedly less-natural products may come down to the fact that a
reading in terms of ‘contains X’ is cognitively less demanding than
a reading in terms of ‘contains artificial flavouring reproducing the
flavour of X.’ Thus, some less knowledgeable and/or involved par-
ticipants may simply have settled for the easiest possible solution
and not taken their relevance processing further than that. A po-
tentially contributing factor (which leads the analysis on to what
corresponds to implicatures in language-based communication) is
that showing a photo instead of merely using the corresponding
word could be taken, relevance-wise, as an indication of “the real
thing” actually being present in the product (see also Messaris,
1997, notion of photographic indexicality which he describes as a
major tool for suggesting real-world existence commonly used in
advertising and news media, even if increasingly compromised by
easy access to still more convincing image manipulation tools in
present-day digital media; for further discussion on the latter point,
see Messaris, 2012).
drawings might, in turn, come down to their more conventionalized character
which allows more generalized and abstract readings as may also be argued
for words. The real-life communicative domain addressed in the experimen-
tal study to be summarized here offers a suitable context for testing such as-
sumptions against empirical observations, even if some variables of interest,
including the photo-drawing opposition, remain to be additionally scrutinized
in future work.
Naming & Framing at Level 4 75
Be that as it may, the majority of participants appear to have
been sufficiently knowledgeable and/or involved to reject the sim-
plest accessible proposition-like reading and consider other alter-
natives. Moreover, the presence of a photo in itself may also have
been interpreted differently, say, as an indication that the manu-
facturer wants the consumer to believe that the product contains
that ingredient, which is not tantamount to believing it oneself.
While hypothetical at this stage, such considerations might well be
put to further empirical test in the future. Furthermore, on top of
possible propositional interpretations comes the well-documented
circumstance that the decoding of pictures involves the same neural
systems that we use to detect actual objects and events which, in
turn, are closely connected to other systems via associative con-
nections (Vermeulen, Corneille, & Niedenthal, 2008; Beauchamp,
Lee, Haxby, & Martin, 2002; Damasio & Damasio, 1994), including
those underlying taste and reward (Simmons, Martin, & Barsalou,
2005). This means that seeing a picture of what one knows to be
a tasty ingredient may elicit a spontaneous emotional desire for
the corresponding sensory experience, bypassing any more elab-
orate information processing that might otherwise have preceded
the purchase decision. In sum, placing pictures of natural ingredi-
ents on products not containing them has a versatile potential for
compromising communicative fairness even if it is hard to accuse
anyone of “lying” about anything.
4.6 Is Fair (Strategic) Communication Possible?
Returning to persuasive communication in general and the ample
possibilities offered by a number of psychological mechanisms to
support it (some of which were just considered in further detail),
one question remains: Where does all this leave communicative
fairness – and is such an ideal feasible at all? Some authors argue
to the contrary (Gidlöf et al., 2013), while others opt for a more
balanced approach (Smith et al., 2011). Thus, none of what has been
said so far alters the fact that some individuals will on some oc-
casions demonstrably try to dig deeper into whatever subject has
caught their particular interest, given realistic time constraints and
the prior knowledge available to them. What can reasonably be ex-
pected of fairness-minded communicators, then, would be to keep
all doors open to such an honest attempt rather than systematically
obscuring it, which is by no means tantamount to abstaining from
promoting whatever good cause one might have.
76 Naming & Framing at Level 4
Addressing the still more heated debates on whether cyberspace
promotes democracy and human rights or leaves such institutions
open to attack from less democratically minded actors, Tabansky
(2017, 2013) suggests applying Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle
to evaluating research results of potential relevance. The principle
says, in short, that any hypothesis should be formulated in a way
so that it can be tested against alternative hypotheses and declared
false if not consistent with the evidence gained. Tabansky’s primary
concern is thus with defining the scientific “rules of the game” for
feeding into political debates which, arguably, entails a certain risk
of politicalizing the scientific debate itself. At least, a complemen-
tary perspective would be to see citizens’ awareness of and uncom-
promised access to examining and critically comparing alternative
framings of any issue of their potential interest as a fundamental
precondition of any informed opinion-building, perhaps for the ex-
ception of messages that violate fundamental democratic principles
such as promotion of racism or child abuse. In developed democ-
racies, this ideal is no longer threatened by overt censorship (for
political messages) or lack of efficient legal regulation of evidently
dishonest conducts such as lying and cheating (for commercial
messages), but by the obvious potential of powerful communica-
tors to promote some interest-driven framings at the direct expense
of others, as backed up by humans’ deep-rooted tendency to rely
on stereotype thinking, low-involvement decision-making, unsub-
stantiated inferences, and avoidance of cognitive dissonance (see
Entman, 1993: 56–58 for closely related concerns not yet envisaging
the rise of cyberspace).
What could be done to remedy this situation is far beyond the
scope of this book. However, recognizing and understanding the
totality of mechanisms involved would appear to be a good start.
5 Concluding Remarks
Most of the theoretical frameworks addressed in this book are not
new in themselves. However, many of them have not previously
been combined or applied to the elaborate patchwork of issues that
we have here subsumed under the heading of naming & framing.
Likewise, many of the practical areas of human activity where
the power of words is recognized as a decisive factor (marketing,
politics, journalism, health care, terminology management, and
so on) are highly selective about which analytical and operational
tools they allow into their own remit, leaving potentially fruitful
cross-disciplinary synergies unattended.
So far, the most prominent focus in research published under
the present heading is naming & framing in the inclusive sense
here referred to as Level 4. However, the operationalization of this
level goes through what we have called Levels 1–3, that is, select-
ing and/or creating and contextually framing particular names in
a way that underpins particular strategic or intuitive agendas. This
includes operating on the mechanisms through which a particu-
lar understanding of a given wider subject becomes encapsulated
(also) in individual names and enrolled in something as seemingly
objective and monolithic as human language(s). In other words, we
are dealing with an ecosystem where all four levels feed into each
other, and although the interest in the mainstream framing liter-
ature presently tends to “get stuck” at Level 4, the lasting effect
will usually be fixed at Level 1 (via 2 and 3), which is how we can
explain why many people support ecotaxes, recent propaganda, and
like Apple computers.
Manoeuvring across this whole ecosystem is nowadays mostly
left to communicative practitioners who rely primarily on their
accumulated hands-on experience, talent, and intuition. However,
the present account shows that several fields of research so far un-
attended in a declared naming & framing context have essential
insights and tools to contribute to this work.
78 Concluding Remarks
That includes theorizing and empirical evidence on:
• the degree to which the structural and typological features of
individual languages may constrain or support particular nam-
ing & framing decisions and strategies;
• the dynamic nature of human categorization, including the
role of situational, social, and cultural factors in determining
whether or not a given category is likely to become canonized
and “frozen” by language;
• people’s real-time decoding of familiar names and spontaneous
interpretation of unfamiliar (novel) names in running commu-
nication, including the specifics of non-arbitrary (motivated)
names in this respect;
• the interplay between the built-in semantic potential of a name
(viz. the Joyce principle) and the influence of surrounding ver-
bal and nonverbal contextual cues (viz. the Juliet principle) that
ultimately determines the name’s full communicative potential;
• competing framings of the same name in running communica-
tion and how they influence individual language users’ personal
understanding and use of that name in different situations, as
captured by the hypothesis of division of linguistic labour;
• people’s real-time decoding of multimodal communicative
products encountered in still more complex transmedial envi
ronments, including the dynamics between visual attention
and semantic disambiguation and the influence of different
processing patterns in that regard on people’s comprehension
of individual names and of more complex subject matters;
• the impact of different constellations of verbal and nonverbal
communicative resources on people’s inference-making during
situational relevance processing and how different outcomes of
these processes may affect emotions, beliefs, and subsequent
decision-making.
It is hard to see how a comprehensive understanding of our present
topic could be reached without including (at least) the perspectives
just mentioned. And yet, they tend to live their separate lives in
different disciplines, research communities, journals, collaborative
projects, organizations, and so on. Attempts to bridge between (some
of) them have nevertheless repeatedly been made and some are taken
a step further in this book in pursuing the overall agenda set up in
Section 0.3. The circumstance that this does not appear to be entirely
Concluding Remarks 79
infeasible, if one decides to try, suggests that the perspectives are
complementary rather than inherently alien.
What is needed most of all is a good cause, and in that respect
taking a genuine interest in real-life communicative domains and
resultant communicative products viewed (also) in their entirety
rather than breaking them down into smaller parts and sub-issues
from the outset appears to be an effective catalyst. The overarch-
ing agenda of multimodal communication research is probably
the most clear example of the potential of such a more holistic ap-
proach to enhance our understanding also of specific sub-issues
such as (in casu) naming & framing operations. The same is, of
course, true of the domains of human activity in which they occur.
Real-life naming & framing decisions made in the course of pro-
moting new products, setting political agendas, or fighting gender
inequality at ones workplaces are bound to involve some – even if
often intuitive – consideration about which words will do the job
best, how the verbal and visual surroundings in which they are used
will affect people’s comprehension of them, and to what degree the
intended message is consistent with the current conceptual land-
scape of the intended audience.
The modest ambition of this book is to bring a broader selec-
tion of theoretical insights and analytical tools into “active duty”
in such domains where naming and framing decisions are in fact
being made and/or evaluated on a daily basis. In turn, the establish-
ment of such new links would seem to have a potential for feeding
new impulses back into the contributing disciplines themselves and
diversifying the cross-disciplinary dialogue between them. Fur-
thermore, some of the points and observations made might also be
brought to bear in current debates on communicative ethics and
fairness, qualifying miscommunication as much more than a mat-
ter of factual (in)correctness.
References
Aaker, D. (1991). Managing brand equity: Capitalizing on the value of a
brand name. The Free Press.
Agyemang, C., Bhopal, R., & Bruijnzeels, M. (2005). Negro, Black, Black
African, African Caribbean, African American or what? Labelling
African origin populations in the health arena in the 21st century.
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 59(12), 1014–1018.
Aitchison, J. (2012). Words in the mind: An introduction to the mental
lexicon. Fourth edition. John Wiley & Sons.
Alexander, C. (2017). New study comes the closest yet to proving that
e-cigarettes aren’t as dangerous as smoking. Cancer Research UK.
URL: https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2017/02/06/new-study-
comes-the-closest-yet-to-proving-that-e-cigarettes-arent-as-dangerous-
as-smoking/ (accessed June 2020).
Alexander, D., Lynch, J., & Wang, Q. (2008). As time goes by: Warm
intentions and cold feet for really new versus incrementally new
products. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(3), 307–319.
Anderson, W. B. (2018). Counter-framing: Implications for public relations.
Public Relations Inquiry, 7(2), 111–126.
Andrews, S., & Davis, C. (1999). Interactive activation accounts of
morphological decomposition: Finding the trap in mousetrap? Brain
and Language, 68(1–2), 355–361.
Ang, S. H. (1997). Chinese consumers’ perception of alpha‐numeric brand
names. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 14(3), 220–233.
Apthorpe, R., & Gasper, D. (Eds.). (1996). Arguing development policy:
Frames and discourses. Routledge.
Ares, G., Giménez, A., Bruzzone, F., Vidal, L., Antúnez, L., & Maiche,
A. (2013). Consumer visual processing of food labels: Results from an
eye‐tracking study. Journal of Sensory Studies, 28(2), 38–153.
Ariel, M. (2010). Defining pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational. Harper Collins.
Armstrong, J. (2016). The problem of lexical innovation. Linguistics and
Philosophy, 39(2), 87–118.
Arora, S., Kalro, A. D., & Sharma, D. (2015). A comprehensive framework
of brand name classification. Journal of Brand Management, 22(2), 79–116.
82 References
Avineri, E., & Waygood, E. O. D. (2013). Applying valence framing to
enhance the effect of information on transport-related carbon dioxide
emissions. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 48,
31–38.
Backhaus, J. G. (1999). The law and economics of environmental taxation:
When should the ecotax kick in? International Review of Law and Eco-
nomics, 19(1), 117–134.
Bail, C. A. (2014). The cultural environment: Measuring culture with big
data. Theory and Society, 43(3–4), 465–482.
Balasubramanian, S. K. (1994). Beyond advertising and publicity: Hybrid
messages and public policy issues. Journal of Advertising, 23(4), 29–46.
Baldinger, K. (1980). Semantic theory: Towards a modern semantics.
Blackwell.
Banyard, K. (2016). The dangers of rebranding prostitution as ‘sex
work.’ The Guardian. June 7, 2016. URL: https://www.theguardian.
com/ lifeandstyle/2016/jun/06/prostitution-sex-work-pimp-state- kat-
banyard-decriminalisation (accessed June 2020).
Barsalou, L. W. (2016). Situated conceptualization: Theory and applica-
tions. In Y. Coello & M. H. Fischer (Eds.), Foundations of embodied
cognition, Volume 1: Perceptual and emotional embodiment (pp. 11–37).
Psychology Press.
Barsalou, L. W. (2010). Grounded cognition: Past, present, and future.
Topics in Cognitive Science, 2(4), 716–724.
Barsalou, L. W. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual
system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(5–6), 513–562.
Barsalou, L. W. (1995). Deriving categories to achieve goals. In A. Ram &
D. B. Leake (Eds.), Goal Directed Learning (pp. 121–176). MIT Press.
Barsalou, L. W. (1987). The instability of graded structure: Implications
for the nature of concepts. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and concep-
tual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization
(pp. 101–140). Cambridge University Press.
Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory & Cognition, 11(3),
211–227.
Barton, H. (2016). Persuasion and compliance in cyberspace In I. Con-
nolly, M. Palmer, H. Barton, & G. Kirwan (Eds.), An introduction to
cyberpsychology (pp. 111–123). Routledge.
BBC News. (2018). Syria war: What we know about Douma ‘chemical
attack’. BBC News. July 10, 2018. URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/
world-middle-east-43697084 (accessed June 2020).
Beauchamp, M. S., Lee, K. E., Haxby, J. V., & Martin, A. (2002). Parallel
visual motion processing streams for manipulable objects and human
movements. Neuron, 34(1), 149–159.
Benczes, R. (2006a). Analysing metonymical noun-noun compounds: The
case of freedom fries. The metaphors of sixty: Papers presented on the
occasion of the 60th birthday of Zoltán Kövecses, 46–54.
References 83
Benczes, R. (2006b). Creative compounding in English. The semantics of
metaphorical and metonymical noun-noun combinations. John Benjamins.
Bentsen, S. E. (2018). The comprehension of English texts by native speakers
of English, and Japanese, Chinese and Russian speakers of English as a
Lingua Franca: An empirical study. PhD Thesis. Copenhagen Business
School.
Berger, J. (2014). Word of mouth and interpersonal communication: A
review and directions for future research. Journal of Consumer Psychol-
ogy, 24(4), 586–607.
Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1969). Basic color terms: Their universality and
evolution. University of California Press.
Berridge, V. (1996). AIDS in the UK: The making of policy, 1981–1994.
Oxford University Press.
Berthele, R., & Stocker, L. (2016). The effect of language mode on motion
event descriptions in German–French bilinguals. Language and Cogni-
tion, 9(4), 648–676.
BibleGateway. (2011). The tower of Babel. Genesis 11: 1–9. New International
Version (NIV). BibleGateway. URL: https://www.biblegateway.com/
passage/?search=Genesis+11%3A1-9&version=NIV (accessed June 2020).
Birkbak, A. (2017). When financial concerns shape traffic policy: How eco-
nomic assumptions muted the Copenhagen payment zone issue. Science
as Culture, 26(4), 491–504.
Bizer, G. Y., & Petty, R. E. (2005). How we conceptualize our attitudes
matters: The effects of valence framing on the resistance of political
attitudes. Political Psychology, 26(4), 553–568.
Blank, S., & Dorf, B. (2012). The startup owner’s manual: The step-by-step
guide for building a great company. K & S Ranch.
Boas, F. (1911). Handbook of American Indian languages. Nabu Press.
Böck, M., & Pachler, N. (Eds.). (2013). Multimodality and social semiosis:
Communication, meaning-making, and learning in the work of Gunther
Kress. Routledge.
Bone, P. F., & France, K. R. (2001). Package graphics and consumer prod-
uct beliefs. Journal of Business and Psychology, 15(3), 467–489.
Bovaird, T. (2004). Public–private partnerships: From contested concepts
to prevalent practice. International Review of Administrative Sciences,
70(2), 199–215.
Brown, F. C., Buboltz, Jr, W. C., & Soper, B. (2002). Relationship of sleep
hygiene awareness, sleep hygiene practices, and sleep quality in univer-
sity students. Behavioral Medicine, 28(1), 33–38.
Brown, P. (1995). Naming and framing: The social construction of diag-
nosis and illness. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 35(Extra Issue),
34–52.
Bruner, E. M., Hinchman, L. P., & Hinchman, S. K. (1997). Memory,
identity, community: The Idea of narrative in the human sciences. State
University of New York Press.
84 References
Bruni, E., Tran, N. K., & Baroni, M. (2014). Multimodal distributional
semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 49, 1–47.
Bulling, A. (2016). Pervasive attentive user interfaces. IEEE Computer,
49(1), 94–98.
Busse, D. (2017). Frames as a model for the analysis and description of
concepts, conceptual structures, conceptual change, and concept
hierarchies. In T. Pommerening & W. Bisang (Eds.), Classification from
antiquity to modern times (pp. 281–309). De Gruyter Mouton.
Bybee, J. (2007). Frequency of use and the organization of language. Oxford
University Press.
Bybee, J. (1995). Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and
Cognitive Processes, 10(5), 425–455.
Carey, C. (1994). Rhetorical means of persuasion. In I. Worthington (Ed.),
Persuasion: Greek rhetoric in action (pp. 26–45). Routledge.
Carson, T. L. (2016). Frankfurt and Cohen on bullshit, bullshiting, decep-
tion, lying, and concern with the truth of what one says. Pragmatics &
Cognition, 23(1), 53–67.
Castelló, I., Morsing, M., & Schultz, F. (2013). Communicative dynamics
and the polyphony of corporate social responsibility in the network
society. Journal of Business Ethics, 118(4), 683–694.
Chan, A. K. K., & Huang, Y. Y. (2001). Chinese brand naming: A li nguistic
analysis of the brands of ten product categories. Journal of Product &
Brand Management, 10(2), 103–119.
Chandon, P., & Wansink, B. (2007). The biasing health halos of fast-
food restaurant health claims: Lower calorie estimates and higher
side-dish consumption intentions. Journal of Consumer Research,
34(3), 301–314.
Chang, W. L., & Lii, P. (2008). Luck of the draw: Creating Chinese brand
names. Journal of Advertising Research, 48(4), 523–530.
Charette, P., Hooker, N. H., & Stanton, J. L. (2015). Framing and naming:
A process to define a novel food category. Food Quality and Preference,
40, 147–151.
Charteris-Black, J. (2011). Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of
metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan.
Chong, D., & Druckman, J. N. (2007). Framing theory. Annual Review of
Political Science, 10, 103–126.
Chun, M. M., & Wolfe, J. M. (2008). Visual attention. In E. B. Goldstein
(Ed.), Blackwell handbook of sensation and perception (pp. 272–310).
Blackwell.
Cienki, A. (2007). Frames, idealized cognitive models, and domains. In
D. Geeraerts & H. Cuyckens (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive
linguistics (pp. 170–187). Oxford University Press.
CIPR. (2018). CIPR Code of Conduct. Chartered Institute of Public Re-
lations (UK). URL: https://www.cipr.co.uk/ethics (accessed June 2020).
Clark, E. V. (2018). Word meanings and semantic domains in acquisition.
Semantics in Language Acquisition, 24, 21–43.
References 85
Clement, J. (2007). Visual influence on in-store buying decisions: An
eye-track experiment on the visual influence of packaging design. Jour-
nal of Marketing Management, 23(9–10), 917–928.
Cohen, L. J. (1986). How is conceptual innovation possible? Erkenntnis,
25(2), 221–238.
Colby, D. C., & Cook, T. E. (1991). Epidemics and agendas: The politics
of nightly news coverage of AIDS. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and
Law, 16(2), 215–249.
Collins, L. (1977). A name to conjure with: A discussion of the naming of
new brands. European Journal of Marketing, 11(5), 337–363.
Conradie, E. (2016). The implications for consumer protection law in the
European Union of behaviourally informed commercial practices. Master
Thesis. Lund University. URL: https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/
search/publication/8884364 (accessed June 2020).
Corcoran, N. (Ed.). (2013). Communicating health: Strategies for health
promotion. Second Edition. Sage.
Crable, R. E., & Vibbert, S. L. (1985). Managing issues and influencing
public policy. Public Relations Review, 11(2), 3–16.
Cui, G., Lui, H. K., & Guo, X. (2012). The effect of online consumer reviews
on new product sales. International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
17(1), 39–58.
Cummings, L. (2013). Pragmatics: A multidisciplinary perspective.
Routledge.
Damasio, A. R., & Damasio, H. (1994). Cortical systems for retrieval of
concrete knowledge: The convergence zone framework. In C. Koch &
J. L. Davis, (Eds.), Large-scale neuronal theories of the brain (pp. 61–74).
MIT Press.
D’Angelo, P., & Kuypers, J. A. (Eds.). (2010). Doing news framing analysis.
Empirical and theoretical perspectives. Routledge.
Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2017). Language in business, language at work.
Palgrave.
Darley, W. K., Blankson, C., & Luethge, D. J. (2010). Toward an integrated
framework for online consumer behavior and decision making process:
A review. Psychology & marketing, 27(2), 94–116.
de Bessé, B. (1997). Terminological definitions. In S. E. Wright & G. Budin
(Eds.), Handbook of terminology management. Volume 1: Basic aspects of
terminology management (pp. 63–74). John Benjamins.
de Saussure, F. (2011 [1916]). Course in general linguistics. Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Deutscher, G. (2010). Through the language glass: Why the world looks dif-
ferent in other languages. Metropolitan Books.
Devitt, M., & Sterelny, K. (1999). Language and realty: An introduction to
the philosophy of language. MIT Press.
Di Francesco, L. (2013). 7 criteria for a great brand name. Business 2 Com-
munity. URL: https://www.business2community.com/branding/7-criteria-
for-a-great-brand-name-0375307 (accessed June 2020).
86 References
Drews, S., & van den Bergh, J. C. (2016). What explains public support
for climate policies? A review of empirical and experimental studies.
Climate Policy, 16(7), 855–876.
Druckman, J. N., & Parkin, M. (2005). The impact of media bias: How
editorial slant affects voters. The Journal of Politics, 67(4), 1030–1049.
Durst-Andersen, P. (2011). Linguistic supertypes. A cognitive-semiotic
theory of human communication. De Gruyter Mouton.
Durst-Andersen, P. (1992). Mental grammar: Russian aspect and related
issues. Slavica Publishers.
Durst-Andersen, P., Smith, V., & Nedergaard Thomsen, O. (2013). Towards
a cognitive-semiotic typology of motion verbs. In C. Paradis J. Hudson,
& U. Magnusson (Eds.), The construal of spatial meaning: Windows into
conceptual space (pp. 190–222). Oxford University Press.
Dynel, M. (2016). On untruthfulness, its adversaries and strange bedfel-
lows. Pragmatics & Cognition, 23(1), 1–15.
Elish, M. C., & Boyd, D. (2018). Situating methods in the magic of Big
Data and AI. Communication Monographs, 85(1), 57–80.
Emke, I. (2000). Agents and structures: Journalists and the constraints on
AIDS coverage, Canadian Journal of Communication, 25(3), 325–345.
Entman, R. M. (2007). Framing bias: Media in the distribution of power.
Journal of Communication, 57(1), 163–173.
Entman, R. M. (2004). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion,
and US foreign policy. University of Chicago Press.
Entman, R. M. (2003). Cascading activation: Contesting the White House’s
frame after 9/11, Political Communication, 20(4), 415–432.
Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured para-
digm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58.
Esser, F., Reinemann, C., & Fan, D. (2000). Spin doctoring in British and
German election campaigns: How the press is being confronted with a new
quality of political PR. European Journal of Communication, 15(2), 209–239.
Evans, V., & Green, M. (2006). Cognitive linguistics: An introduction.
Edinburgh University Press.
Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of
language. Second edition. Routledge.
Fairhurst, G. (2011). The power of framing: Creating the language of leader-
ship. John Wiley & Sons.
Fairhurst, G., & Sarr, R. (1996). The art of framing. Jossey-Bass.
Fauconnier, G., & Lakoff, G. (2009). On metaphor and blending. Cognitive
Semiotics, 5(1–2), 393–399.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2003). The way we think: Conceptual blend-
ing and the mind’s hidden complexities. Basic Books.
Fenko, A., Nicolaas, I., & Galetzka, M. (2018). Does attention to health
labels predict a healthy food choice? An eye-tracking study. Food Qual-
ity and Preference, 69, 57–65.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University
Press.
References 87
Figert, A. E. (2017). Women and the ownership of PMS. Routledge.
Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C. (1988). Regularity and idiom-
aticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language,
64(3), 501–538.
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2013). Social cognition: From brains to culture.
Second edition. Sage.
Fodor, J. A. (1975) The language of thought. Harvard University Press.
Fog, K., Budtz, C., & Yakaboylu, B. (2005). Storytelling: Branding in
practice. Springer.
Forceville, C. (2014). Relevance Theory as model for analysing visual and
multimodal communication. In D. Machin (Ed.), Visual Communica-
tion (pp. 51–70). Walter de Gruyter.
Forceville, C. (2008). Metaphor in pictures and multimodal representa-
tions. In R. W. Gibbs, Jr. (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor
and thought (462–482). Cambridge University Press.
Forgas, J. P., & Laham, S. M. (2016). Halo effects. In R. F. Pohl
(Ed.), Cognitive illusions: Intriguing phenomena in judgement, thinking
and memory (276–290). Psychology Press.
Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2006). Conceptual combination: Impli-
cations for the mental lexicon. In G. Libben & G. Jarema (Eds.), The
representation and processing of compound words (pp. 145–168). Oxford
University Press.
Gagné, C. L., Spalding, T. L., & Gorrie, M. C. (2005). Sentential context
and the interpretation of familiar open-compounds and novel modifier-
noun phrases. Language and Speech, 48(2), 203–219.
Gallie, W. B. (1955). Essentially contested concepts. Proceedings of the Ar-
istotelian Society, 56, 167–198.
Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking Politics. Cambridge University Press.
Garre, M. (1999). Human rights in translation: Legal concepts in different
languages. Copenhagen Business School Press.
Gattol, V., Sääksjärvi, M., Gill, T., & Schoormans, J. (2016). Feature fit:
The role of congruence and complementarity when adding versus de-
leting features from products. European Journal of Innovation Manage-
ment, 19(4), 589–607.
Gee, J. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Fifth
edition. Routledge.
Geeraerts, D. (2010). Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford University Press.
Geeraerts, D. (2006). Prototype theory: Problems and prospects of proto-
type theory. In D. Geeraerts (Ed.), Cognitive linguistics: Basic readings
(pp. 141–165). De Gruyter Mouton.
Gennari, S. P., MacDonald, M. C., Postle, B. R., & Seidenberg, M. S.
(2007). Context-dependent interpretation of words: Evidence for inter-
active neural processes. Neuroimage, 35(3), 1278–1286.
Ghidaoui, M. S., Zhao, M., McInnis, D. A., & Axworthy, D. H. (2005).
A review of water hammer theory and practice. Applied Mechanics
Reviews, 58(1), 49–76.
88 References
Giboreau, A., Dacremont, C., Egoroff, C., Guerrand, S., Urdapilleta, I.,
Candel, D., & Dubois, D. (2007). Defining sensory descriptors: Towards
writing guidelines based on terminology. Food Quality and Preference,
18(2), 265–274.
Gidlöf, K., Wallin, A., Holmqvist, K., & Møgelvang-Hansen, P. (2013).
Material distortion of economic behaviour and everyday decision qual-
ity. Journal of Consumer Policy, 36(4), 389–402.
Gill, T., & Dubé, L. (2007). What is a leather iron or a bird phone? Us-
ing conceptual combinations to generate and understand new product
concepts. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17(3), 202–217.
Giovagnoli, M. (2011). Transmedia storytelling: Imagery, shapes and tech-
niques. ETC Press.
Gitlin, S. (2009). The meaning of ‘Bing.’ New York Times, June 7, 2009.
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/08/opinion/lweb08soft.html
(accessed June 2020).
Glatter, R. (2014) Can smartphones adversely affect cognitive de-
velopment in teens? Forbes. URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/
robertglatter/2014/05/19/can-smartphones-adversely-affect-cogni-
tive-development-in-teens/#7976295c63bc (accessed June 20209).
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of expe-
rience. Harper and Row.
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization
in language. Oxford University Press.
Graham, P. (2004). Hackers and painters. Big ideas from the computer age.
O’Reilly Media.
Granata, G., Tartagilone, A. M., & Theodosios, T. (Eds.). (2019). Predicting
trends and building strategies for consumer engagement in retail environ-
ments. IGI Global.
Graves, M. F., August, D., & Mancilla-Martinez, J. (2013). Teaching vocab-
ulary to English language learners. Teachers College Press.
Grinyaev, S. (2001). Information warfare: The history, the present and
the future. Center for Strategic Assessment and Forecasts (Russia).
URL: http://csef.ru/en/politica-i-geopolitica/265/informaczionnaya-
vojna-istoriya-den-segodnyashnij-i-perspektiva-538 (accessed June
2020).
Grist (2020). How to talk to a climate skeptic: Responses to the most
common skeptical arguments on global warming. Grist 50. 2020. URL:
https://grist.org/series/skeptics/ (accessed June 2020).
Groh, A. (2016). Culture, language and thought: Field studies on colour
concepts. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 16(1–2), 83–106.
Grunig, J. E., & Hunt, T. (1984). Managing public relations. Thomson
Learning.
Gumperz, J. J., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (1996). Rethinking linguistic
relativity. Cambridge University Press.
Hallahan, K. (1999). Seven models of framing: Implications for public
relations. Journal of Public Relations Research, 11(3), 205–242.
References 89
Hammond, P. (2018). Framing post-Cold War conflicts: The media and in-
ternational intervention. Manchester University Press.
Hampe, B., & Grady, J. E. (Eds.). (2005). From perception to meaning: Im-
age schemas in cognitive linguistics. Vol. 29. De Gruyter Mouton.
Handl, S., & Schmid, H. (Eds.). (2011). Windows to the mind: Metaphor,
metonymy and conceptual blending. De Gruyter Mouton.
Hardin, C. L., & Maffi, L., (Eds.). (1997). Color categories in thought and
language. Cambridge University Press.
Harley, T. A. (2014). The psychology of language: From data to theory.
Fourth edition. Psychology Press.
Harrell, L. (2014). 41 brand names people use as generic terms. Mental
Floss. URL: http://mentalfloss.com/article/56667/41-brand-names-peo-
ple-use-generic-terms (accessed June 2020).
Harris, A. (2014). Where I’m from: How a trip to Kenya changed the way
I think about the terms African-American and black American. Slate.
URL: https://slate.com/culture/2014/07/black-american-versus-african-
american-why-i-prefer-to-be-called-a-black-american.html?via=gd-
pr-consent&via=gdpr-consent (accessed June 2020).
Heath, R. L., & Palenchar, M. J. (2008). Strategic issues management: Or-
ganizations and public policy challenges. Sage.
Herslund, M., & Baron, I. (2003). Language as world view: Endocentric
and exocentric representations of reality. Copenhagen Studies in Lan-
guage, 29, 29–42.
Herzog, R. J. (2007). A model of natural disaster administration: Naming
and framing theory and reality. Administrative Theory & Practice, 29(4),
586–604.
Hilton, J. L., & von Hippel, W. (1996). Stereotypes. Annual Review of Psy-
chology, 47(1), 237–271.
Hjelmslev, L. (1953 [1943]). Prolegomena to a theory of language. Translated
by Francis J. Whitfield. Waverly Press.
Hobson, B., Lewis, J., & Siim, B. (Eds.). (2002). Contested concepts in gen-
der and social politics. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Hockett, C. F. (1958). A course in modern linguistics. Macmillan.
Hoeffler, S. (2003) Measuring preferences for really new products. Journal
of Marketing Research, 40(4), 406–420.
Hoeyer, K. (2005). Studying ethics as policy: The naming and framing of
moral problems in genetic research. Current Anthropology, 46(S5), S71–S90.
Hollister, S. (2020). How fast are Apple’s new ARM Mac chips?
It’s hard to tell. The Verge. June 23. URL: https://www.theverge.
com/2020/6/23/21296365/apple-mac-arm-processor-silicon-chips-per-
formance-power-speed-wwdc-2020 (accessed June 2020).
Holsanova, J. (2012). New methods for studying visual communication
and multimodal integration. Visual Communication 11(3), 251–257.
Holsanova, J., Rahm, H., & Holmqvist, K. (2006). Entry points and read-
ing paths on newspaper spreads: Comparing a semiotic analysis with
eye-tracking measurements. Visual Communication, 5(1), 65–93.
90 References
Hörmann, H. (1986) Meaning and context: An introduction to the psychol-
ogy of language. Plenum Press.
Hörmann, H. (1981). To mean to understand: Problems of psychological
semantics. Springer.
Huh, Y. E., Vosgerau, J., & Morewedge, C. K. (2016). More similar but less
satisfying: Comparing preferences for and the efficacy of within-and
cross-category substitutes for food. Psychological Science, 27(6), 894–903.
Incardona, R., & Poncibò, C. (2007). The average consumer, the unfair
commercial practices directive, and the cognitive revolution. Journal of
Consumer Policy, 30(1), 21–38.
Irish, L. A., Kline, C. E., Gunn, H. E., Buysse, D. J., & Hall, M. H. (2015).
The role of sleep hygiene in promoting public health: A review of empir-
ical evidence. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 22, 23–36.
ISO (2009). ISO 704. Terminology work: Principles and methods. Third
edition. Geneva: ISO.
Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic structures. MIT Press.
Jackson, C. A. (2016). Framing sex worker rights: How US sex worker
rights activists perceive and respond to mainstream anti–sex trafficking
advocacy. Sociological Perspectives, 59(1), 27–45.
Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A. Bower
(Ed.), On translation (pp. 232–239). Harvard University Press.
Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J. J., & O’Halloran, K. L. (2016). Introducing multimo-
dality. Routledge.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2006). How we reason. Oxford University Press.
Jones, R. H. (2017). Discourse. In A. Barron, Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The
Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 371–833). Routledge.
Jones, R. H. (2014). The multimodal dimension of claims in food packag-
ing. Multimodal Communication, 3(1), 1–11.
Jowett, G. S., & O’Donnell, V. (2018). Propaganda & persuasion. Sage
Publications.
Juhasz, B. J. (2018). Experience with compound words influences their pro-
cessing: An eye movement investigation with English compound words.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(1), 103–112.
Kabel, L. (2017). The coverage of Russia by the Danish media: On media
created images and their consequences. Nordic Council of Ministers &
Ajour.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.
Kaufmann, H. R., Loureiro, S. M. C., & Manarioti, A. (2016). Explor-
ing behavioural branding, brand love and brand co-creation. Journal of
Product & Brand Management, 25(6), 516–526.
Keil, F. C., Stein, C., Webb, L., Billings, V. D., & Rozenblit, L. (2008).
Discerning the division of cognitive labor: An emerging understanding
of how knowledge is clustered in other minds. Cognitive Science, 32(2),
259–300.
Keller, K. L. (2016). Reflections on customer-based brand equity: Perspec-
tives, progress, and priorities. AMS Review, 6(1–2), 1–16.
References 91
Keller, K. L. (2001). Building customer-based brand equity: A blueprint for
creating strong brands. Marketing Science Institute.
Kellner, D. (2015). Media spectacle and the crisis of democracy: Terrorism,
war, and election battles. Routledge.
Kennedy, G. A. (2008). The art of rhetoric in the Roman world. Wipf and
Stock Publishers.
Kent, R. J., & Allen, C. T. (1994). Competitive interference effects in con-
sumer memory for advertising: The role of brand familiarity. Journal of
Marketing, 58(3), 97–105.
Kiefer, M., & Barsalou, L. W. (2013). Grounding the human concep-
tual system in perception, action, and internal states. In W. Prinz, M.
Beisert, & A. Herwig (Eds.), Action science: Foundations of an emerging
discipline (pp. 381–407). MIT Press.
Kim, J., Thomas, P., Sankaranarayana, R., Gedeon, T., & Yoon, H. J.
(2015). Eye‐tracking analysis of user behavior and performance in web
search on large and small screens. Journal of the Association for Informa-
tion Science and Technology, 66(3), 526–544.
Kim, S., Suh, E., & Hwang, H. (2003). Building the knowledge map: An
industrial case study. Journal of Knowledge Management, 7(2), 34–45.
Kittay, E., & Lehrer, A. (Eds.). (1992). Frames, fields, and contrasts: New es-
says in semantic and lexical organization. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Klein, H. (2018). Information warfare and information operations:
Russian and U.S. perspectives. Journal of International Affairs, 71 (Spe-
cial Issue), 135–142.
Klimchuk, M. R., & Krasovec, S. A. (2013). Packaging design: Successful
product branding from concept to shelf. John Wiley & Sons.
Klink, R. R. (2001). Creating meaningful new brand names: A study of
semantics and sound symbolism. Journal of Marketing Theory and Prac-
tice, 9(2), 27–34.
Klüver, H., & Sagarzazu, I. (2016). Setting the agenda or responding to
voters? Political parties, voters and issue attention. West European Pol-
itics, 39(2), 380–398.
Knüpfer, C. B., & Entman, R. M. (2018). Framing conflicts in digital
and transnational media environments. Media, War & Conflict, 11(4),
476–488.
Kockaert, H. J., & Steurs, F. (Eds.). (2015). Handbook of terminology. John
Benjamins.
Kohli, C., & LaBahn, D. W. (1997). Creating effective brand names: A study
of the naming process. Journal of Advertising Research, 37(1), 67–75.
Kone, A. M. (2013). Between linguistic universalism and linguistic rela-
tivism: Perspectives on human understandings of reality. Inquiries, 5(9).
URL: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=761 (accessed June 2020).
Korzen, I. (2016). Endocentric and exocentric verb typology: Talmy revis-
ited – on good grounds. Language and Cognition, 8(2), 206–236.
Korzen, I. (2006). Endocentric and exocentric languages in translation.
Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 13(1): 21–37.
92 References
Koster, D., & Cadierno, T. (2018). Is perception of placement universal? A
mixed methods perspective on linguistic relativity. Lingua, 207, 23–37.
Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality. A social semiotic approach to contemporary
communication. Routledge.
Kress, G. (1993). Against arbitrariness: The social production of the
sign as a foundational issue in critical discourse analysis. Discourse &
Society, 4(2), 169–191.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. V. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes
and media of contemporary communication. Hodder Education.
Krishna, A. (2012). An integrative review of sensory marketing: Engag-
ing the senses to affect perception, judgment and behavior. Journal of
Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 332–351.
Krott, A. (2009). The role of analogy for compound words. In J. P. Blevins
& J. Blevins (Eds.), Analogy in grammar: Form and acquisition (pp.
118–136). Oxford University Press.
Krott, A., & Nicoladis, E. (2005). Large constituent families help children
parse compounds. Journal of Child Language, 32(1), 139–158.
Kumar, D. (2006). Media, war, and propaganda: Strategies of information
management during the 2003 Iraq war. Communication and Critical/
Cultural Studies, 3(1), 48–69.
Kurtz, K. J., & Gentner, D. (2001). Kinds of kinds: Sources of category
coherence. In J. D. Moore & K. Stenning (Eds.), Proceedings of the An-
nual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 522–527). Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Lähteenmäki, L., Lampila, P., Grunert, K., Boztug, Y., Ueland, Ø.,
Åström, A., & Martinsdóttir, E. (2010). Impact of health-related
claims on the perception of other product attributes. Food Policy,
35(3), 230–239.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things. What categories
reveal about the mind. University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical
prerequisites. Vol. 1. Stanford University Press.
LaPlante-Dube, S. (2017). How to market services – treat them like a
product. Precision Marketing Group. URL: https://www.precisionmar-
ketinggroup.com/blog/bid/76722/how-to-market-services-treat-them-
like-a-product (accessed June 2020).
Leape, J. (2006). The London congestion charge. Journal of Economic Per-
spectives, 20(4), 157–176.
Lecheler, S., Bos, L., & Vliegenthart, R. (2015). The mediating role of emo-
tions: News framing effects on opinions about immigration. Journalism
& Mass Communication Quarterly, 92(4), 812–838.
Ledin, P., & Machin, D. (2020). Introduction to multimodal analysis.
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ledingham, J. A. (2003). Explicating relationship management as a gen-
eral theory of public relations. Journal of Public Relations Research,
15(2), 181–198.
References 93
Lee, Y. H., & Ang, K. S. (2003). Brand name suggestiveness: A Chinese
language perspective. International Journal of Research in Marketing,
20(4), 323–335.
Legrand, P. (1997a). Against a European civil code. The Modern Law
Review, 60(1), 44–63.
Legrand, P. (1997b). The impossibility of “legal transplants.” Maastricht
Journal of European and Comparative Law, 4(2), 111–124.
Leopold, W. (1929). Inner form. Language, 5(4), 254–260.
Levy, J., & Jakobsson, P. (2014). Sweden’s abolitionist discourse and law:
Effects on the dynamics of Swedish sex work and on the lives of Sweden’s
sex workers. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 14(5), 593–607.
Libben, G. (2014). The nature of compounds: A psychocentric perspective.
Cognitive Neuropsychology, 31(1–2), 8–25.
Libben, G., & Jarema, G. (Eds.). (2006). The representation and processing
of compound words. Oxford University Press.
Liu, B., Chin, C. W., & Ng, H. T. (2003). Mining topic-specific concepts
and definitions on the web. In Proceedings of the 12th international
conference on World Wide Web (pp. 251–260). ACM.
Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile de-
struction: An example of the interaction between language and memory.
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585–589.
Luntz, F. (2007). Words that work: It’s not what you say, it’s what people
hear. Hyperion.
Lynch, J. A., & Zoller, H. (2015). Recognizing differences and commonali-
ties: The rhetoric of health and medicine and critical-interpretive health
communication. Communication Quarterly, 63(5), 498–503.
Lynott, D., & Connell, L. (2010). Embodied conceptual combina-
tion. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 212. URL: https://doi.org/10.3389/
fpsyg.2010.00212 (accesses June 2020).
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Vol. 1–2. Cambridge University Press.
MacMaoláin, C. (2015). Food law: European, domestic and international
frameworks. Bloomsbury Publishing.
MacMaoláin, C. (2007). EU food law: Protecting consumers and health in a
common market. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Macnamara, J., Lwin, M., Adi, A., & Zerfass, A. (2016). ‘PESO’ media
strategy shifts to ‘SOEP’: Opportunities and ethical dilemmas. Public
Relations Review, 42(3), 377–385.
Madsen, B. M., & Thomsen, H. E. (2015). Concept modelling vs. data
modelling in practice. In H. J. Kockaert & F. Steurs (Eds.), Handbook of
terminology (pp. 250–275). John Benjamins.
Malt, B. C., Gennari, S., & Imai, M. (2010). Lexicalization patterns and
the world-to-words mapping. In B. C. Malt and P. Wolff (Eds.), Words
and the mind: How words capture human experience (pp. 29–57). Oxford
University Press.
Malt, B. C., & Wolff, P. (Eds.). (2010). Words and the mind: How words
capture human experience. Oxford University Press.
94 References
Manelis, L., & Tharp, D. A. (1977). The processing of affixed words.
Memory & Cognition, 5(6), 690–695.
Marius, B. (2016), The journey to discover the true meaning of a startup.
Bmarius.com. URL: https://bmarius.com/a-journey-to-discover-the-
true-meaning-of-a-startup-21bb20b1dfd6 (accessed June 2020).
Markman, E. M. (1990). Constraints children place on word meanings.
Cognitive Science, 14(1), 57–77.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2003). The language of evaluation:
Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
Marzo, D. (2015). Motivation, compositionality, idiomatization. In P. O.
Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen, & F. Rainer (Eds.), Word formation. An in-
ternational handbook of the languages of Europe. Vol. 1–2 (pp. 984–1001).
De Gruyter Mouton.
Mathews, D. (2016). Naming and framing difficult issues to make sound de-
cisions. Kettering Foundation.
Matthews, J. (2009). What’s in a frame? A content analysis of media-
framing studies in the world’s leading communication journals, 1990–
2005. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 86(2), 349–367.
Maurya, U. K., & Mishra, P. (2012). What is a brand? A perspective on
brand meaning. European Journal of Business and Management, 4(3),
122–133.
Mautner, G. (2016). Discourse and management: Critical perspectives
through the language lens. Macmillan.
McCombs, M. (1997). New frontiers in agenda setting: Agendas of
attributes and frames. Mass Communication Review, 24(1&2), 32–52.
McCroskey, J. C. (2016). An Introduction to rhetorical communication.
Ninth edition. Routledge.
McWhorter, J. (2003). The power of babel: A natural history of language.
Random House.
Meijers, M. H., Remmelswaal, P., & Wonneberger, A. (2018). Using visual
impact metaphors to stimulate environmentally friendly behavior: The
roles of response efficacy and evaluative persuasion knowledge. Envi-
ronmental Communication, 1–14. DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2018.1544160
Messaris, P. (2012). Visual “literacy” in the digital age. Review of Commu-
nication, 12(2), 101–117.
Messaris, P. (1997). Visual persuasion: The role of images in advertising. Sage.
Mey, J. L. (1985). Whose language? A Study in linguistic pragmatics. John
Benjamins.
Miller, D., & Dinan, W. (2008). A century of spin: How public relations
became the cutting edge of corporate power. Pluto Press.
Møgelvang-Hansen, P. (2010). Misleading presentation of food: Methods
of legal regulation and real-life case scenarios. In H. W. Micklitz, V.
Smith, & M. Ohm Rørdam (Eds.), New challenges for the assessment of
fairness in a common market. EUI Working Papers LAW, 21 (pp. 49–57).
European University Institute.
References 95
Molander, R. C., Riddile, A., Wilson, P. A., & Williamson, S. (1996). Stra-
tegic information warfare: A new face of war. RAND.
Mori, Y., & Nagy, W. (1999). Integration of information from context and
word elements in interpreting novel kanji compounds. Reading Research
Quarterly, 34(1), 80–101.
Moskowitz, H. R., Reisner, M., Itty, B., Katz, R., & Krieger, B. (2006).
Steps towards a consumer-driven ‘concept innovation machine’ for food
and drink. Food Quality and Preference, 17(7–8), 536–551.
Müller, P. O., Ohnheiser, I., Olsen, S., & Rainer, F. (Eds.). (2015). Word
formation. An International handbook of the languages of Europe. Vol.
1–2. De Gruyter Mouton.
Mulligan, K. (Ed.). (1990). Mind, meaning and metaphysics: The philosophy
and theory of language of Anton Marty. Springer.
Murphy, G. L. (2010). What are categories and concepts? In D. Mare-
schall, P. C. Quin, & S. E. G. Lea (Eds.), The making of human concepts
(pp. 11–28). Oxford University Press.
Murphy, G. L. (2004). The big book of concepts. MIT Press.
Murphy, J. (1992). What is branding? In J. Murphy (Ed.), Branding, a key
marketing tool (pp. 1–12). Macmillan.
Muzellec, L. (2006). What is in a name change? Re-joycing corporate names
to create corporate brands. Corporate Reputation Review, 8(4), 305–316.
Nagy, W. E. (1995). On the role of context in first-and second-language vo-
cabulary learning. University of Illinois.
NCI. (2019). Cell phones and cancer risk. National Cancer Institute. URL:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/
cell-phones-fact-sheet?redirect=true (accessed June 2020).
Nelson, T. E., Oxley, Z. M., & Clawson, R. A. (1997). Towards a psychol-
ogy of framing effects. Political Behavior, 19(3), 221–246.
Newen, A., & Bartels, A. (2007). Animal minds and the possession of con-
cepts. Philosophical Psychology, 20(3), 283–308.
Nguyen, S. P., & McCullough, M. B. (2009). Making sense of what is
healthy for you: Children and adults evaluative categories of food. In
S. J. Ellsworth & R. C. Schuster (Eds.), Appetite and Nutritional Assess-
ment (pp. 175–187). Nova Science Publishers.
Nguyen, T. T., Hui, P. M., Harper, F. M., Terveen, L., & Konstan, J. A.
(2014). Exploring the filter bubble: The effect of using recommender sys-
tems on content diversity. In Proceedings of the 23rd international confer-
ence on world wide web (pp. 677–686). ACM.
Nielsen, J. H., Escalas, J. E., & Hoeffler, S. (2018). Mental simulation and
category knowledge affect really new product evaluation through trans-
portation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 24(2), 145–158.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). The halo effect: Evidence for uncon-
scious alteration of judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psy-
chology, 35(4), 250–256.
Nöth, W. (1995). Handbook of semiotics. Indiana University Press.
96 References
O’Brien, K., Eriksen, S., Nygaard, L. P., & Schjolden, A. N. E. (2007).
Why different interpretations of vulnerability matter in climate change
discourses. Climate Policy, 7(1), 73–88.
OED (2018). New words list, January 2018. Oxford English Dictionary
(OED). URL: https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-january-
2018/ (accessed June 2020).
O’Halloran, K. L., Tan, S., & Marissa, K. L. E. (2017). Multimodal analy-
sis for critical thinking. Learning, Media and Technology, 42(2), 147–170.
O’Halloran, K. L., Tan, S., Pham, D. S., Bateman, J., & Vande Moere,
A. (2018). A digital mixed methods research design: Integrating multi-
modal analysis with data mining and information visualization for big
data analytics. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 12(1), 11–30.
Ojala, M. M., Pantti, M. K., & Kangas, J. (2017). Whose war, whose fault?
Visual framing of the Ukraine conflict in Western European newspa-
pers. International Journal of Communication, 11, 474–498.
O’Keefe, D. J. (2016). Persuasion: Theory and research. Third edition. Sage.
Ooms, K., Coltekin, A., De Maeyer, P., Dupont, L., Fabrikant, S., Incoul,
A., … & Van der Haegen, L. (2015). Combining user logging with eye
tracking for interactive and dynamic applications. Behavior Research
Methods, 47(4), 977–993.
Orquin, J. L., & Loose, S. M. (2013). Attention and choice: A review on
eye movements in decision making. Acta Psychologica, 144(1), 190–206.
Özcan, E., & van Egmond, R. (2012). Basic semantics of product sounds.
International Journal of Design, 6(2), 41–54.
Painter, N. I. (2006). Creating black Americans: African-American history
and its meanings, 1619 to the present. Oxford University Press.
Papafragou, A., Massey, C., & Gleitman, L. (2002). Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll:
The representation of motion in language and cognition. Cognition,
84(2), 189–219.
Paradis, C. (2004). Where does metonymy stop? Senses, facets, and active
zones. Metaphor and Symbol, 19(4), 245–264.
Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you.
Penguin.
Park, C. (2014). Naming and framing. Art of Simple. Blog founded by
Tsh Oxenreider. URL: https://theartofsimple.net/naming-and-framing/
(accessed June 2020).
Park, Y., & Chen, J. V. (2007). Acceptance and adoption of the innovative use
of smartphone. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 107(9), 1349–1365.
Patterson, K., Nestor, P. J., & Rogers, T. T. (2007). Where do you know
what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the
human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 976–987.
Pavlenko, A. (2014). The bilingual mind and what it tells us about language
and thought. Cambridge University Press.
Pessin, A., & Goldberg, S. (Eds.). (1996). The Twin Earth chronicles: Twenty
years of reflection on Hilary Putnam’s the “Meaning of Meaning.” Routledge.
References 97
Peterson, R. D., & Palmer, C. L. (2017). Effects of physical attractiveness
on political beliefs. Politics and the Life Sciences, 36(2), 3–16.
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). Communication and persuasion:
Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. Springer.
Piaget, J. (2002 [1926]). The language and thought of the child. Third edition.
Routledge.
Pieters, R., & Warlop, L. (1999). Visual attention during brand choice: The
impact of time pressure and task motivation. International Journal of
research in Marketing, 16(1), 1–16.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: The new science of language and
mind. Penguin.
Pinto, H. S., & Martins, J, P. (2004). Ontologies: How can They be Built?
Knowledge and Information Systems, 6, 441–464.
Pinxten, R. (Ed.) (1976). Universalism versus relativism in language and
thought. Mouton.
Poberezhskaya, M., & Ashe, T. (Eds.). (2018). Climate change discourse in
Russia: Past and present. Routledge.
Pollack, K. M. (2004). Spies, lies, and weapons: What went wrong. The
Atlantic Monthly, 293(1), 78–92.
Powell, T. E. (2017). Multimodal news framing effects. PhD Thesis. Univer-
sity of Amsterdam.
Powell, T. E., Boomgaarden, H. G., de Swert, K., & de Vreese, C. H.
(2019). Framing fast and slow: A dual processing account of multimodal
framing effects. Media Psychology, 22(4), 572–600.
Powell, T. E., Boomgaarden, H. G., de Swert, K., & de Vreese, C. H. (2015).
A clearer picture: The contribution of visuals and text to framing ef-
fects. Journal of Communication, 65(6), 997–1017.
Prince, P. (1996). Second language vocabulary learning: The role of context
versus translations as a function of proficiency. The Modern Language
Journal, 80(4), 478–493.
PRSA. (2018). PRSA Code of Ethics. Public Relations Society of Amer-
ica. URL: https://www.prsa.org/ethics/code-of-ethics (accessed June
2020).
Putnam, H. (1975a). The meaning of ‘meaning’. In H. Putnam (Ed.), Mind,
Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2 (pp. 215–271). Cam-
bridge University Press.
Putnam, H. (1975b). Is semantics possible? In H. Putnam (Ed.), Mind, Lan-
guage and Reality. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2 (pp. 139–152). Cambridge
University Press.
Ramscar, M. J., & Port, R. (2015). Categorization (without categories).
In E. Dabrowska & D. Divjak (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics
(pp. 75–99). De Gruyter Mouton.
Ran, B., & Duimering, P. R. (2010). Conceptual combination: Models,
theories and controversies. International Journal of Cognitive Linguis-
tics, 1(1), 65–90.
98 References
Ratneshwar, S., Barsalou, L.W., Pechmann, C., & Moore, M. (2001). Goal
derived categories: The role of personal and situational goals in category
representation. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 10(3), 147–157.
Rebollar, R., Lidón, I., Martín, J., & Puebla, M. (2015). The identifica-
tion of viewing patterns of chocolate snack packages using eye-tracking
techniques. Food Quality and Preference, 39, 251–258.
Reese, S. D. (2010). Finding frames in the web of culture: The case of
the war on terror. In O. D’Angelo & J. A. Kuypers (Eds.), Doing news
framing analysis (pp. 33–58). Routledge.
Regier, T., Kay, P., Gilbert, A. L., & Ivry, R. B. (2010). Language and
thought: Which side are you on, anyway? In B. C. Malt & P. Wolff (Eds.),
Words and the Mind: How words capture human experience (pp. 165–182).
Oxford University Press.
Resnick, P., Garrett, R. K., Kriplean, T., Munson, S. A., & Stroud, N.
J. (2013). Bursting your (filter) bubble: Strategies for promoting diverse
exposure. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported
cooperative work companion (pp. 95–100). The ACM Digital Library.
Ribeiro, F., & Cerveira, M. E. (Eds.). (2018). Challenges and opportunities
for knowledge organization in the digital age. Ergon.
Rideout, B. (2008). Storytelling, narrative rationality, and legal persua-
sion. The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, 14, 53–86.
Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup. Crown Business.
Riezebos, R., Kist, B., & Kootstra, G. (2003). Brand management: A theo-
retical and practical approach. Prentice Hall.
Rindell, A. (2008). What brands mean to us: A short introduction to brand re-
search within Consumer Culture Theory. HAAGA-HELIA Publications.
Roberts-Miller, P. (2002). Post-contemporary composition: Social
constructivism and its alternatives. Composition Studies, 30(1), 97–116.
Rodin, M. (1992). The social construction of premenstrual syndrome. So-
cial Science & Medicine, 35(1), 49–56.
Roe, B. E., Levy, A. S., & Derby, B. M. (1999). The impact of health claims
on consumer search and product evaluation outcomes: Results from
FDA experimental data. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 18(1),
89–115
Rogers, E. M. (2010). Diffusion of innovations. Fourth edition. The Free
Press.
Rojo, A., & Cifuentes-Férez, P. (2017). On the reception of translations:
Exploring the impact of typological differences on legal contexts.
In I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano (Ed.), Motion and Space across Languages
(pp. 367–398). John Benjamins.
Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Jour-
nal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3), 192–233.
Ross, B. H., & Murphy, G. L. (1999). Food for thought: Cross- classification
and category organization in a complex real-world domain. Cognitive
Psychology, 38(4), 495–553.
References 99
Rumelhart, D. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In
R. Spiro, B. Bruce, & W. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading
comprehension (pp. 33–58). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rundh, B. (2009). Packaging design: Creating competitive advantage with
product packaging. British Food Journal, 111(9), 988–1002.
Ryder, M. E. (1994). Ordered chaos: The interpretation of English noun-noun
compounds. University of California Press.
Sager, J. C. (1990). Practical course in terminology processing. John Benjamins.
SALC. (2019). What is SALC? The Scandinavian Association for Language
and Cognition. URL: http://www.salc-sssk.org/home/what-is-salc//
(accessed June 2020).
Sandra, D. (1990). On the representation and processing of compound
words: Automatic access to constituent morphemes does not occur.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42A, 529–567.
Schäfer, M. (2018). The semantic transparency of English compound nouns.
Language Science Press.
Schaffner, B. F., & Sellers, P. J. (2010). Winning with words: The origins and
impact of political framing. Routledge.
Schank, R. C. (1999). Dynamic memory revisited. Cambridge University
Press.
Scherer, K. R., Schorr, A., & Johnstone, T. (Eds.). (2001). Appraisal
processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research. Oxford University Press.
Scheufele, D. A. (1999). Framing as a theory of media effects. Journal of
Communication, 49(1), 103–122.
Schmid, H. J. (2011). Conceptual blending, relevance and novel N+N-
compounds. In S. Handl and H. J. Schmid (Eds.), Windows to the mind:
Metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending (pp. 219–245). De Gruyter
Mouton.
Schmidtke, D., Matsuki, K., & Kuperman, V. (2017). Surviving blind de-
composition: A distributional analysis of the time-course of complex
word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Mem-
ory, and Cognition, 43(11), 1793–1820.
Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. Ecco.
Shah, J. (2018). How to generate name ideas for political movements. Design-
Hill. October 26, 2018. URL: https://www.designhill.com/design-blog/
how-to-generate-name-ideas-for-political-parties/ (accessed June 2020).
Shahab, L., Goniewicz, M. L., Blount, B. C., Brown, J., McNeill, A.,
Alwis, K. U., … & West, R. (2017). Nicotine, carcinogen, and toxin ex-
posure in long-term e-cigarette and nicotine replacement therapy users:
A cross-sectional study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 166(6), 390–400.
Shakespeare, W. (2010 [1597]). Romeo and Juliet. Edited by J. O’Connor.
Longman.
Shocker, A. D., Bayus, B. L., & Kim, N. (2004). Product complements and
substitutes in the real world: The relevance of “other products.” Journal
of Marketing, 68(1), 28–40.
100 References
Shrum, L. J., & Lowrey, T. M. (2007). Sounds convey meaning: The
Implications of phonetic symbolism for brand name construction. In T.
M. Lowrey (Ed.), Psycholinguistic phenomena in marketing communica-
tions (pp. 39–58). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Sidhu, D. M., & Pexman, P. M. (2018). Five mechanisms of sound symbolic
association. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25(5), 1619–1643.
Simard, D. (2004). Using diaries to promote metalinguistic reflection
among elementary school students. Language Awareness, 13(1), 34–48.
Simmons, W. K., Martin, A., & Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Pictures of appe-
tizing foods activate gustatory cortices for taste and reward. Cerebral
Cortex, 15(10), 1602–1608.
Simonet, P. (2016). How the best marketing channel is the packaging. Media
Marketing. URL: https://www.media-marketing.com/en/opinion/how-
the-best-marketing-channel-is-the-packaging (accessed June 2020).
Singh, P., Barry, B., & Liu, H. (2004). Teaching machines about everyday
life. BT Technology Journal, 22(4), 227–240.
Slobin, D. I. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology
and the expression of motion events. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven
(Eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspec-
tives (pp. 219–257). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Slobin, D. I. (1996). From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speak-
ing’. In J. Gumperz & S. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity
(pp. 70–96). Cambridge University Press.
Smith, J. (2017). The UK’s Journeys into and out of the EU: Destinations
Unknown. Routledge.
Smith, A. N., Fischer, E., & Yongjian, C. (2012). How does brand-related
user-generated content differ across YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter?
Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26(2), 102–113.
Smith, E. E., Shoben, E. J., & Rips, L. J. (1974). Structure and process in
semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisions. Psychologi-
cal Review, 81(3), 214–241.
Smith, J., Zakrzewski, A., Johnson, J., Valleau, J., & Church, B. (2016). Cate-
gorization: The view from animal cognition. Behavioral Sciences, 6(2), 12.
Smith, V. (2000). On the contrastive study of lexicalization patterns for
translation purposes: Some reflections on the levels of analysis. In
I. Korzen & C. Marello (Eds.), On linguistic aspects of translation
(pp. 19–42). Edizione dell’Orso.
Smith, V., Barratt, D., & Sørensen, H. S. (2015). Do natural pictures mean
natural tastes? Assessing visual semantics experimentally. Cognitive
Semiotics, 8(1), 53–86.
Smith, V., Barratt, D., & Zlatev, J. (2014). Unpacking noun-noun
compounds: Interpreting novel and conventional food names in isola-
tion and on food labels. Cognitive Linguistics, 25(1), 99–147.
Smith, V., Clement, J., Møgelvang-Hansen, P., & Selsøe Sørensen, H. (2011).
Assessing in-store food-to-consumer communication from a fairness
References 101
perspective: An integrated approach. Fachsprache – International Jour-
nal of Specialized Communication, 33(1–2), 84–106.
Smith, V., Green-Petersen, D., Møgelvang-Hansen, P., Christensen, R. H.
B., Qvistgaard, F, & Hyldig, G. (2013). What’s (in) a real smoothie: A
division of linguistic labour in consumers’ acceptance of name-product
combinations? Appetite, 63, 129–140.
Smith, V., Ohm Søndergaard, M., Clement, J., Møgelvang-Hansen, P.,
Selsøe Sørensen, H., & Gabrielsen, G. (2009). Fair Speak: Scenarier
for vildledning på det danske fødevaremarked. [Fair speak: Scenarios of
misleading practices on the Danish food market.] ExTuto.
Smith, V., Møgelvang-Hansen, P., & Hyldig, G. (2010). Spin versus fair
speak in food labelling: A matter of taste? Food Quality and Preference,
21(8), 1016–1025.
Sojka, J. Z., & Giese, J. L. (2006). Communicating through pictures and
words: Understanding the role of affect and cognition in processing vi-
sual and verbal information. Psychology & Marketing, 23(12), 995–1014.
Sommers-Flanagan, J., & Sommers-Flanagan, R. (2018). Counseling and
psychotherapy theories in context and practice: Skills, strategies, and
techniques. John Wiley & Sons.
Song, M. X., & Montoya‐Weiss, M. M. (1998). Critical development ac-
tivities for really new versus incremental products. Journal of Product
Innovation Management, 15(2), 124–135.
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cogni-
tion. Second edition. Blackwell.
Štekauer, P. (2005). Meaning predictability in word formation. John
Benjamins.
Stepanski, E. J., & Wyatt, J. K. (2003). Use of sleep hygiene in the treat-
ment of insomnia. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 7(3), 215–225.
Susarla, A., Oh, J. H., & Tan, Y. (2012). Social networks and the diffusion
of user-generated content: Evidence from YouTube. Information Systems
Research, 23(1), 23–41.
Swaminathan, V., Gürhan-Canli, Z., Kubat, U., & Hayran, C. (2015). How,
when, and why do attribute-complementary versus attribute-similar co-
brands affect brand evaluations: A concept combination perspective.
Journal of Consumer Research, 42(1), 45–58.
Tabansky, L. (2017). Cybered influence operations: Towards a scientific
research agenda. The Norwegian Atlantic Committee. Security Policy
Library, 2, 1–36.
Tabansky, L. (2013). Does cyberspace promote human rights and democ-
racy?: Applying Karl Popper’s scientific method. The International
Journal of Science in Society, 4(4), 13–23.
Taillard, M. O. (2000). Persuasive communication: The case of marketing.
Working Papers in Linguistics, 12, 145–174.
Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics. Volume II: Typology and
process in concept structuring. MIT Press.
102 References
Tannen, D. E. (1993). Framing in discourse. Oxford University Press.
Ten Hacken, P., & Panocová, R. (Eds.). (2015). Word formation and trans-
parency in medical English. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
The Language Nerds. (2019). Product names that mean something un-
fortunate in other languages. The Language Nerds. URL: http://
thelanguagenerds.com/product-names-that-mean-something-unfortunate-
in-other-languages/ (accessed January 2020).
Thomas, R. (1992). Literacy and orality in ancient Greece. Cambridge
University Press.
Thomas, T. (2015). Russia’s 21st century information war: Working to
undermine and destabilize populations. Defense Strategic Communica-
tions, 1(2), 11–26.
Thomson, D. M. H., & Crocker, C. (2015). Application of conceptual
profiling in brand, packaging and product development. Food Quality
and Preference, 40(Part B), 343–353.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language. Harvard University Press.
Trzaskowski, J. (2011). Behavioural economics, neuroscience, and the
Unfair Commercial Practises Directive. Journal of Consumer Policy,
34(3), 377.
Tse, C. S., & Altarriba, J. (2008). Evidence against linguistic relativity in
Chinese and English: A case study of spatial and temporal metaphors.
Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8(3–4), 335–357.
UCPD. (2005). Directive 2005/29/EC of the European Parliament and of
the Council of 11 May 2005 concerning unfair business-to-consumer com-
mercial practices in the internal market. URL: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/
legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32005L0029 (accessed June
2020).
Ullmann, S. (1962). Semantics: An introduction to the science of meaning.
Blackwell.
Usunier, J. C., & Shaner, J. (2002). Using linguistics for creating better
international brand names. Journal of Marketing Communications, 8(4),
211–228.
Vermeulen, N., Corneille, O., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2008). Sensory load
incurs conceptual processing costs. Cognition, 109(2), 287–294.
Verschueren, J. (1998). Understanding pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
Vliegenthart, R., & van Zoonen, L. (2011) Power to the frame: Bringing
sociology back to frame analysis. European Journal of Communication,
26(2), 101–115.
von Humboldt, W. (1999 [1836]). On language: On the diversity of human
language construction and its influence on the mental development of
the human species. Edited by Michael Losonsky. Cambridge University
Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (2012 [1934]). Thought and language. MIT press.
Walker, F. (n.d.) 15 of the worst car names ever. DriveTribe. URL: https://
drivetribe.com/p/15-of-the-worst-car-names-ever-Uuj3c_VxR7aCu-
WkDCeahg?iid=d6iUMcm-Qp2E_pbcirK9Jw (accessed June 2020).
References 103
Walsh, J. (2017). We were lied to: Voters who have changed their mind
on Brexit. The Guardian. Wednesday October 17. URL: https://www.
theguardian.com/politics/2017/oct/11/we-were-lied-to-voters-who-have-
changed-their-mind-on-brexit (accessed June 2020).
Wansink, B., & Chandon, P. (2006). Can ‘low-fat’ nutrition labels lead to
obesity? Journal of Marketing Research, 43(4), 605–617.
Waugh, L. R. (1993). Against arbitrariness: Imitation and motivation re-
vived, with consequences for textual meaning. Diacritics, 23(2), 71–87.
Webster, F. (2014). Theories of the information society. Fourth edition.
Routledge.
Western States Center. (2003). Dismantling racism: A resource book for
social change groups. Western States Center. Portland, OR: URL: http://
westernstates.center/tools-and-resources/Tools/Dismantling%20Rac-
ism (accessed June 2020).
Whorf, B. L. (1956) Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of
Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll. MIT Press.
Widdowson, H. G. (1995). Discourse analysis: A critical view. Language
and Literature, 4(3), 157–172.
Wierzbicka, A. (1997). Understanding cultures through their key words: En-
glish, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Lexicography and conceptual analysis. Ann Arbor:
Karoma.
Williams, J. N. (1992). Processing polysemous words in context: Evidence for
interrelated meanings. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21(3), 193–218.
Willis, J. (1981). Teaching English through English. Longman.
Wilson, D., & Carston, R. (2007). A unitary approach to lexical pragmat-
ics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts
(Ed.), Pragmatics (pp. 230–260). Palgrave-Macmillan.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and relevance. Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Wintour, P., MacAskill, E., Borger, J., & Chrisafis, A. (2018). US says it
has proof Assad’s regime carried out Douma gas attack. The Guardian.
April 13, 2018. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/13/
uk-denounces-claims-it-was-behind-staged-syrian-gas-attack (accessed
June 2020).
Wisniewski, E. J. (1996). Construal and similarity in conceptual combina-
tion. Journal of Memory and Language, 35(3), 434–453.
Wood, M. L. (1991). Naming the illness: The power of words. Family
Medicine, 23(7), 534–538.
Wozniak, S. (2006). iWoz: Computer geek to cult icon. W.W. Norton &
Company.
Wright, S. E., & Budin, G. (Eds.). (1997). Handbook of terminology
management. Vol. 1. John Benjamins.
Wüster, E. (1959/1960). Das Worten der Welt: Schaubildlich und
terminologisch dargestellt. [The wording of the world: Schematically
and terminologically reproduced.] Sprachforum, 3/4, 183–203.
104 References
Wyer, Jr, R. S., & Srull, T. K. (2014). Memory and cognition in its social
context. Psychology Press.
Yates, K., Friedman, K., Slater, M. D., Berman, M., Paskett, E., &
Ferketich, A. K. (2015). A content analysis of electronic cigarette por-
trayal in newspapers. Tobacco Regulatory Science, 1(1), 94–102.
Yu, V., Rahimy, M., Korrapati, A., Xuan, Y., Zou, A. E., Krishnan, A. R.,
… & Brumund, K. T. (2016). Electronic cigarettes induce DNA strand
breaks and cell death independently of nicotine in cell lines. Oral On-
cology, 52, 58–65.
Zadeh, L. A. (1965). Fuzzy sets. Information and Control, 8(3), 338–353.
Zlatev, J., & Blomberg, J. (2015). Language may indeed influence thought.
Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1631.
Zlatev, J., Smith, V., van de Weijer, J., & Skydsgaard, K. (2010). Noun-noun
compounds for fictive food products: Experimenting in the borderzone
of semantics and pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(10), 2799–2813.
Index
Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to
figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote footnotes.
ad-hoc categories 18–19; human bubble 30, 53, 64
categorization 20–25, 21; human bug spray 34–36
concepts, anatomy of 19–20 built-in motivation 40
ad-hoc concepts 36 built-in semantic potential 78
ad-hoc inference-making 72
African American 58 Cacioppo, J. T. 69
agenda setting 3, 78 categorization 9, 13, 14, 18, 19,
AIDS 11 19n4, 20–25, 44, 63, 78
Alzheimer’s disease 23 causal theories of reference 23n6
Apple 13, 44, 46, 46 caviar 45n4
a priori 17 Cavi-Art 45–47, 52
arbitrary lexical expression-units 29 civil-law legal thinking 14
Ariel, M. 34 climate change 64
C02 emissions 53
balle (versus ball) 15–16 cognitive dissonance 53, 65, 76
ballon (versus ball) 15–16 cognitively oriented language
Baldinger, K. 13 theory 18
Barsalou, L. W. 21 cognitive variables 23n6, 24
Bentsen, S. E. 13 Collins, L. 27, 28, 32, 43; Juliet
betalingsring 32, 38, 68 metaphor 40
Billings, V. D. 54n5 commercial communicative
Bing 38–39 practices 66
black American 58 commercial food products 47–48
Blonsky, M. 11 common-law legal thinking 14
bottom-up extraction 24 communication 2–3, 45; language-
brand images 42, 44, 53 based 18; semiotic resources used
branding 3, 39, 60 for 59; strategic 75–76
brand names 13, 17, 27, 29–30, communicative behaviour 34
36–38, 42, 44–46, 48, 49, 51, communicative ethics, implications
52; high- vs. low-budget route for 65–67
framing of 43–53; value of 52 communicative fairness 75
brand owners 52 communicator 17; choice of words
Brexit 1, 11, 13 59; professional 66, 67
106 Index
compact electronic devices 12 essential (conceptual) components 19
compound-processing literature 36 essentially contested concepts 54
concept 19–22, 25, 30, 31, 31n1, eye-tracking 47, 50–51
32, 33, 35–38, 41, 54, 54n5,
55–57; for ad-hoc categories fairness: communicative 75;
22; cognitive function of 18; implications for 65–67
componential analysis of 21; fake news 25
identification and delimitation of falsifiability principle 76
20; knowledge and 24 familiar name 34, 35, 78
conceptual analysis 39 foie gras 55, 56
conceptual blending theory 45n4 food product 59n1, 72; commercial
conceptual clash 45n4 47–48
conceptual components 19–20, 31 Forceville, C. 72, 74
conceptual restructuring 45n4 foreign language 41
conceptual structure 24, 44; analysis framing 60, 67–68; in language
of 56 and communication research 54;
congestion charge 32 mental shortcuts 69; situational
congruent name-context pairings 48 relevance 69–72, 73, 74–75;
consumer: behaviour 66; with stereotype thinking 68–69
minimal knowledge 71 Freedom fries (vs. French fries) 37
contested concepts 31, 54 French words 15–17, 16
context, role of 33–34n2
contextual framings 48, 49, 54 Gallie, W. B. 31, 54
control vs. credibility and effect Gamson, W. A. 62
51–53 Geeraerts, D. 54n5
Covid-19 1, 11 Germanic languages 15
cross-disciplinary dialogue 60 Gitlin, S. 39
cross-disciplinary positioning 8–10 gold 55, 56
graphic motivation 29
Danish government 32, 38 green tax 30
decoding processes 47, 51 “grey zone” 24–25
deep state 37
Deutscher, G. 13 hangry 12, 25
Devitt, M. 23n6 Hawaiian pizza 34–36
discourse analysis 24, 59–60 high-budget route 43, 44, 46;
division of linguistic labour 23n6, control vs. credibility and effect
54–56, 65, 78 51–53; framing of brand and
Durst-Andersen, P. 13 product names 43–45; “semiotic
cocktails” 45–48, 46, 49, 50–51
earned media 44, 45 HIV 11
e-cigarettes 53 Homo Economicus 66
ecotax 30 how-aspect of lexicalization, the 22
encompassing interactive options 51 human activity 10, 77, 79
English language: “Joyce-principle human categorization 20–25, 21
names” 28; language-typological human concepts, anatomy of 19–20
characteristics of 17; words 5, 15 human decision-making 66
Entman, R. M. 8, 60–62, 61n2, 64, 65 human language(s) 77
environmental policies 30 Humboldt, W. von 13
Eskimo languages 14 hygiene 38; sleep 30, 38, 63
Index 107
identification 19n4, 21 lexical (word) level 40n1
idiosyncrasies 17 lexical non-arbitrariness 29
image 9, 20n5, 46, 47, 64, 72, 74; lexical semantics 68n4
brand 42, 44, 53 linguistic data 14
incongruent name-context linguistic relativism 13–14, 21, 63
pairings 48 linguistic relativity 14
in-depth conceptual analysis 39 linguistic universalism 13
individual languages 78 linguists 28
individual names 59–60 long-term language-internal
Indo-European 14 influences 17
information war 31, 58, 64 low-budget route: control vs.
Internet 66 credibility and effect 51–53;
interpretation 47–48, 51 framing of brand and product
issues management 59 names 43–45; “semiotic
cocktails” 45–48, 46, 49, 50–51
jewellery 55 low-involvement settings 70
Jones, R. H. 50
Joyce, J. 27; lessons learned from macaroons 57
37–39 Mandarin Chinese 17
the Joyce principle 27, 36, 39 mansplaining 37
“Joyce-principle names” 28 marketing 2, 3, 9, 27, 28, 30,
the Juliet principle 27, 36, 58; 38–39, 41, 44, 45; large-scale
manifestations of 42; potential campaigns 44
of 38 Mautner, G. 3
mead 57
Keil, F. C. 54n5 meaning-in-context issue 40n1
knowledge: and concepts 24; mental checklists 18
consumer with minimal 72; mental shortcuts 67, 69
structured conceptual 24 Messaris, P. 72, 73, 73n6
metalinguistic reflection 34, 35, 38
labelling practices 50 methodology 24, 39, 61
Lakoff, G. 54n5 miscommunication 15, 17, 79
Langacker, R. W. 28 misleadingness 50
language 13–17, 16; authority morphological motivation 29
(ethos) of users 56; dominant motivation 32, 37, 38, 40, 45, 58, 63;
conception of 54; lexical non- built-in 40; morphological 29, 64,
arbitrariness in 9; systematic 69; phonetic 28–29; political 32;
uses of 2 semantic 29, 30
language-based communication 18, multimodal character, of level 3
72, 73, 73n6 framings 40–43
language-internal factors 17 multimodal communication 3, 42,
language processing 33–34, 35, 46, 68, 79
36–37 multimodal communication
language-theoretical literature 40n1 research 42, 79
language-typological differences 14 multimodal communicative
law & ethics 67 products 78
lexical arbitrariness 28–32 multimodal contexts 15–16
lexical expression(-unit) 5 multimodal framings 59
lexicalization 15, 19n4, 22, 24 multimodality 9, 47
108 Index
multimodal resources 51 positive brand image 53
multimodal stimuli 47 powernap 63
premenstrual syndrome (PMS) 12
names/naming: from ad-hoc product: development 4; physical
categories to first candidates for origin of 47–48
18–25; at level 1 revisited, success product-line specific brand names 46
criteria for 25–26; negotiated product name 30, 43–53, 60; high- vs.
53–57; verbal and visual framing low-budget route framing of 43–53
of 51 professional communicators
naming and framing 1–4, 77; aims 66, 67
and scope 4–8; cross-disciplinary professional language, specialized
positioning 8–10; levels of 5–6, meaning(s) in 55
6, 7; theorizing and empirical propaganda
evidence 78; understanding full propositional components 20
ecosystem of 62–65, 65 protected designation of origin
natural kinds 23 (PDO) 52
nature-given properties 23 prototype 68n4
negro 58 prototypical (conceptual)
nerd 5, 12 components 19
non-arbitrariness 9, 29 public framings 61
non-arbitrary names 32, 36, 53 Putnam, H. 23n6, 54–57, 54–55n5,
non-arbitrary words 41 65, 68n4
non-verbal communicative 67, 70
non-verbal communicative raspberry 73, 73n6
resources 78 real-life communicative domain
non-verbal contextual cues 63 74n6, 79
non-verbal (visual) framings 62 real-life food naming, implication
noun-noun compound name, for 50
familiar vs. unfamiliar 34, 35 real-life support 11
“really new products” 11
ordinary language 55, 56 real-time decoding 51, 78
oversimplification 67 red blood cells 23
owned media 45, 52, 60, 66 relevance processing 70, 71, 73, 74
relevance theory (RT) 67, 70–73
packaging design 50, 69, 73 re-naming 31, 58
paid media 44, 45, 52 resultant communicative products 79
performance-oriented disciplines 43 Romance languages 15
persuasion 3, 58 Rosch, E. 68n4
Petty, R. E. 69 Rozenblit, L. 54n5
phonetic motivation 28–29 running communication 6, 25, 43, 78
picture 3, 4, 9, 25, 33, 36, 42, 46, 48,
50, 51, 60, 61, 73, 74, 75 salient concept 22, 24, 30
picture-based communication 72, seaweed 45n4
73n6 semantic motivation 29
Place-Food compounds 48, 49 “semiotic cocktails” 45–48, 46, 49,
politics 9, 60, 77 50–51
polysemous words 40n1 semioticians 28
Popper, K. 76 semiotic modalities 43, 61
Index 109
semiotic resources 59, 72 Tracey Communications 11
sensory components 20 Tracey, K. 11
sex worker 31, 58 Trzakowski, J. 66, 67
Shakespeare, W. 27
shared media 44–45, 52 Unfair Commercial Practices
situational relevance 69–70, 71, Directive (UCPD) 66
72–75 unfamiliar name 34, 35, 78
sleep hygiene 30, 38, 63 unprotected (generic) product
smartphone 12, 38, 40, 41, 52–53, 56 names 52–53
smoothie 57
social media 44, 66 verbal claim 36, 48, 49, 51
Sommers-Flanagan, J. 65 verbal communicative resources 67,
Sommers-Flanagan, J. & R. 65 70, 78
Sperber, D. 70 verbal contextual cues 63
spin 61 verbal framing of names 51
startup 32, 54 visual framing of names 51
Stein, C. 54n5
step-by-step relevance processing 70 Walker, F. 39
stereotype 14, 55, 67, 68–69, 68n4, 76 water hammer 22, 24
stereotype thinking 68–69 weak consumer 72
strategic communications 31, 75–76 Webb, L. 54n5
strong consumer 72 what-aspect of lexicalization, the 22
structural language theory 28 Whorf, B. L. 13
structured conceptual knowledge 24 Wierzbicka, A. 13
substitute names 31, 37, 58 Wilson, D. 70
surimi shrimps 57 word acquisition 23n6, 36
systematic framing 42 word formation 29
word of mouth 38, 42
Tabansky, L. 76 words 5; communicator’s choice of
taxation 30 59; importance of choosing and/
tentative conceptualizations 63 or creating 3; isolated 73, 73n6;
terminology management 41 non-arbitrary 41; polysemous
Thanksgiving dinner 22 40n1; systematic uses of 2