TRADEMARKS AND BRAND NAMES USED AS COMMON NOUNS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

A borderline between proper names and general ones is not ultimate. Therefore usage of proper names as general ones is acceptable, moreover it is dictated by the “life” of the language that develops and require new meanings and connotation. The use of a trademark or brand name as a common noun is caused by the lack of generic name for a certain set of products. There are attempts to fill these gaps by some word structures or clumsy paraphrases. The appearance of an appropriate trademark or brand name causes the phenomenon of its substitution of big and artificial words or phrases. The development of this transition dictates the actuality of the research. First of all this phenomenon can be also explained by the fact that such proper names comprise general concept that is distinguished and clear to a big number of people and are so significant that can be understood even by the bearers of different languages. Although the process is unstoppable, certain companies go a long way to prevent this and defend their brand name. The aim of the research is to focus on identification and analysis of appellativation mechanisms contributing to the enrichment of the English lexicon. The tasks are to analyze and display the etymology of certain brand names that have become common and as a result filled lexical gaps in the English language. Generally speaking the schemes of shifting proper names into general ones may be referred to as metonymy (the act of referring to anything by the name of something else that is closely connected with it) or a kind of semantic conversion or shift where the word does not change its morphology (it remains to be a noun) but acquires wider and deeper meaning. As for perspectives of further studies we consider analyzing brand names functioning in the Ukrainian language as compared to the English one, also by using corpus-based research methods.