Lexiculture and Linguistics: a corpus-driven approach to brand names in everyday speech

Perfecto but also perfectos: in other words, how do proprietary eponyms behave in our everyday language? Which shade of meaning of a collectively shared culture do they give voice to? How do these genericized trademarks carry the message among interlocutors who make them their own, as an integral part of their lexical-cultural baggage? At the crossroads where eponyms linguistic and juridical natures converge, how does the generic trademark linguistic sign adapt to the different speakers’ communicative needs? In fact, do they perceive Perfecto as a proprietary eponym or as a product tradename? The principal aim of this work is to provide an instantaneous lexical-cultural picture of the most widely used proprietary eponyms in the French commercial scene, using the available institutional databases, such as: the French Industrial Property database, European Law databases and Araneum, a corpus of 1,2 million tokens to support a research conducted with a corpus-driven approach on the basis of a list of empirical datasets of proprietary eponyms collected at the end of the year 2015. The data study and analysis highlight the marked trend amongst speakers to make use of proprietary eponyms as collectively shared vehicles of meaning and explore their creativity and thought-processes through eponyms.