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ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Despite the relevance of powerful brands in the present-day market, Branding; pragmatics;
research on the process of brand name design from a cognitive inter-cultural studies; wine
perspective focuses almost exclusively on the effects of the use of brands; cultural models
conceptual metaphor, and to a lesser extent, metonymy,
overlooking the role played by other cognitive strategies. This
paper analyzes the potentiality of mitigation and strengthening
cognitive operations as tools for the systematic, risk-free design
of new brand names with highly predictable and felicitous
connotations. In particular, it focuses on their role in the
systematic generation of axiologically positive brands in both
Spanish and American wine labels, thus largely reducing the need
for the costly and time-consuming cultural checks that branding
companies need to run on new brand names before their
commercial launching. In so doing, the interaction of the two
aforementioned cognitive operations with a number of pragmatic
principles and cultural models of social interaction, and their
subservience to other cognitive operations, like those of
comparison, correlation, and domain expansion and reduction, are
also considered. The results of the study offer new insights on the
semantics of commercial brand names which should prove useful
for branding professionals, as well as data of interest to linguists
dealing with inter-linguistic issues and cognitive modeling alike.
1. Introduction
This paper takes advantage of the theoretical contributions to the area of cognitive
linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera Masegosa
2014) in order to analyze the potentiality of some of the cognitive operations involved in
language processing as tools for the creation of inter-culturally effective wine brand
names. In this regard, there is already some evidence supporting the role of cognitive
metaphors and, to a lesser extent, metonymies in marketing and brand name design
(Fillis and Rentschler 2008; Zaltman and Zaltman 2008; Prez-Hernndez 2011). Thus,
brand names like Puma and Camel have obvious metaphorical foundations in the
GREAT CHAIN OF BEING metaphor; while others like Kellogs and Hellmans are metony-
mic in nature (i.e. PRODUCER/FOUNDER OF A COMPANY FOR PRODUCT). The inventory of
cognitive operations underlying the use of language is, however, much richer (see Ruiz de
Mendoza and Galera Masegosa [2014] for an exhaustive classication and Felices Lago
[1999] for an interesting application to the eld of branding). This paper specically
focuses on the role played by mitigation and strengthening operations in the construction
of brand names and the generation of adequate and axiologically positive brand associ-
ations. In accordance with the needs of the branding industry, these cognitive operations
enable interpretations which go beyond those that can be conveyed literally. The fre-
quency of occurrence of these two cognitive operations in comparison to that of meta-
phoric (i.e. comparison and correlation) and metonymic (i.e. domain reduction and
expansion) operations will be assessed in relation to both American and Spanish wine
brand names, and their interactions with (1) the cue provided by the wine brand name,
(2) a number of pragmatic principles and maxims (Leech 1983), and (3) a set of cultural
models of social interaction (Ruiz de Mendoza 1996) will also be investigated.
The data for this study consist of a collection of 1500 Spanish and American wine
brands. This corpus will be analyzed in search of those particular realization procedures
that underlie the workings of mitigation and strengthening operations in Spanish and
American wine labels, thus shedding light on the preference for the linguistic implemen-
tation of the different cognitive operations by speakers of either language.
It is hypothesized that both mitigation and strengthening operations are two basic and
highly productive mechanisms for wine brand creation, whose semantic effects can be
determined and predicted beforehand to a considerable extent, thus helping marketing
professionals to overcome some of the current difculties in the branding industry.
Marketing requirements often impose constraints on brand names, which call for the
latter to exhibit a brief and synthetic form. The semantic fabric of brand names and
their signicance need, therefore, to be inferentially enriched by consumers at a later
stage. This paper constitutes a cognitive linguistics foray into how this can be done. It
offers a panorama of the patterns of interaction and the degree of subsidiarity of the differ-
ent cognitive operations underlying the semantics of wine brands in the two languages
under scrutiny, thus providing additional valuable information not only for wine branding
and marketing professionals, but also for linguists interested in cross-linguistic studies and
cognitive modeling alike.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of the
literature on wine brand design. Section 3 lays out the specic objectives of the present
research, and provides a description of the data included in our corpus of analysis.
Section 4 presents the theoretical constructs on which this research is based. Sections 5
and 6 illustrate the workings of mitigating and strengthening operations on the pro-
duction and interpretation of the wine brands for the Spanish and American corpora,
respectively. Finally, Section 7 concludes with a discussion of the results and their impli-
cations for the branding industry, and cognitive modeling theory. In so doing, some of
the limitations of the present study are considered, offering directions for future research.
valuable assets. Effective brands result in brand equity which has been characterized by
Farquhar (1989) as the value a brand name adds to the product. Brand equity provides
added value to producers and consumers alike. In the case of consumers, a strong
brand name provides information about the product and its quality, helps its recognition
and recall, and reduces the perceived risk by increasing trust in the maker and in the
reliability of the product. For producers, successful brands guarantee loyalty to the rm
as well as a positive impact on attitudes, prices, stability, and demand (Guris et al. 2007,
449). In fact, as stressed by Zinkhan and Martin (1987, 157), a brand name is a part of
what the consumer buys [ having] the potential to represent many ideas and attributes
associated with the product it represents. Ineffective brand names, on the contrary, can
severely hinder the success of a product.
Research on branding, in general, and wine branding, in particular, has been mostly
carried out by marketing scholars. Thus, authors such as Robertson (1989), Keller,
Heckler, and Houston (1998), and Beverland (2005), among others, have investigated
and identied the desirable properties of brand names (i.e. distinctive, suggestive, mean-
ingful, easily recalled, easily pronounced, authentic, etc.). Others have examined the
importance of developing the symbolic values associated with the brand in order to
sustain its competitivity in the market (Vrontis and Papasolomou 2007). And yet many
others have looked into varied marketing-related aspects of branding, such as the inu-
ence of brand names in determining perceptions of brand quality and attitudes toward
the product (Ruiz Vega and Azn Ramos 2007; Forbes and Dean 2013), their effects on
advertising recall (Keller, Heckler, and Houston 1998), and the process of name creation
itself (Hollebeek and Brodie 2009; Zaichkowsky 2010).
General research on branding from a linguistic perspective includes the studies carried
out by Vanden Bergh et al. (1984) on the sound symbolism of plosive consonants, by
Vanden Bergh et al. (1987) on the relevance of phonetic, orthographic, morphological,
and semantic characteristics of brand names, by Bao, Shao, and Rivers (2008) on the
effects of relevance, connotation, and pronunciation of brand names on consumers
brand preference, and by Klink (2000, 2001) on the relevance of semantics and sound sym-
bolism for the creation of meaningful brand names.
More specic studies from a pragmatic and cognitive perspective deal mostly with the
description of linguistic and visual cognitive metaphors, and to a lesser extent, metony-
mies of winespeak, focusing on the language of wine tasting notes (Surez-Toste 2007;
Caballero Rodrguez and Surez-Toste 2010; Creed 2013), and the genres of wine
reviews (Planelles Ivez 2011; Paradis and Olofsson 2013) and wine marketing campaigns
(Phillips and McQuarrie 2004; Negro Alousque 2015). These works, however, are aimed at
the discourse level of marketing narratives and do not touch upon branding and naming-
specic issues. The only study to date on cognitive operations at work in wine branding is
that of Prez-Hernndez (2013a), who offers an overview of how Spanish wine brand
names stem from the underlying workings of a limited set of cognitive operations. This
preliminary analysis, based on a small monolingual corpus of 100 Spanish wine brands,
tentatively revealed that Spanish wine branding shows a preference for the use of meto-
nymic operations involving a domain reduction. Other types of metonymic (i.e. domain
expansion) and metaphoric (i.e. comparison and correlation) operations closely followed
in number, while mitigation and strengthening mechanisms were the least commonly
used by Spanish branding professionals.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 131
popularity. By way of illustration, in the case of Spanish wines, we have included both pres-
tigious designations of origin (e.g. La Rioja, Ribera del Duero), together with others that are
better known for the quantity, rather than the quality of their wines (e.g. D.O. La Mancha,
D.O. Navarra). Two designations of origin belonging to Spanish provinces with an ofcial
language of their own (i.e. Galicia-Galician and Catalonia-Catalan) were also included in
order to enhance the representativeness of the corpus.
The initial list of wine labels for each of the four Spanish and American categories was
rst manually analyzed (1) in search of those brands involving at least one of the cognitive
operations under scrutiny (i.e. comparison, correlation, domain reduction/extension,
mitigation, and strengthening), and (2) in order to rule out repetitive brand names (e.g.
Faustino I, Faustino V, Faustino VII). After this initial ltering stage, and in order to
ensure that the nal collection of wine brands was truly arbitrary and not biased
toward one of the cognitive operations under scrutiny, we selected the rst 375 brands
for each of the four Spanish and American categories in the exact order in which they
were retrieved from the web search. The selected brands were later on analyzed in
depth as to the cognitive operations at work in each of them, and their associated
linguistic realization procedures, as well as in relation to the cultural models that played
a role in their interpretation.
As shall be made apparent in the following sections, categorization of the brands in
the corpus was often not exclusive, many of them falling simultaneously within one or
more categories of cognitive operations (i.e. metaphor and mitigation, metaphor and
strengthening, etc.). Once all brands had been assigned to one or more of the categories
of cognitive operations under scrutiny, we proceeded to (1) a quantitative analysis of the
results in order to assess the frequency of use of mitigation and strengthening oper-
ations in comparison to that of other cognitive strategies used in wine branding, and
the degree of subsidiarity of the former in relation to the latter; and (2) a qualitative
inter-linguistic study aimed at establishing the specic linguistic realization procedures,
used in Spanish and American labels, respectively, for the production of mitigation or
strengthening-based wine brands.
and parametrization, among others. In the context of the branding and naming of new
products, this set of cognitive operations is hypothesized to provide a principle-based
framework for the design of brand names that enables the drawing of positive inferences
and felicitous associations. Due to their special relevance in the eld of wine brands, we
shall focus on the workings of two of the aforementioned cognitive operations, namely,
mitigation and strengthening operations, in the derivation of inferences from the linguistic
cues provided by wine brand names.
petit can hardly be understood as a quality marker when the Catalan petit is so similar
to the French form, which is widely used in apologetic terms to distinguish a houses
second wine. However, the use of mitigation strategies is not necessarily aimed at high-
lighting the quality of the wine, but simply to make it appealing to the consumer. Wine
producers need to be able to sell all wines that they produce regardless of their quality.
The exploitation of the ICM of Size by means of mitigation strategies allows them to do
just so: to present their secondary wines as still pleasant and appealing. A houses
second wine needs to be distinguished from its high quality counterparts, but in such a
way that it is still presented as desirable. In this connection, it would be interesting to
compare the semantic effects of using mitigation strategies based on diminutive sufxes
and adjectives like petit or pequeo, which present the wine as something endearing
and desirable through the activation of the ICM of Size, with alternative adjectives used to
refer to entities of lesser quality (e.g. low, secondary, bottom, minor). The latter do not
exploit the ICM of Size, but rather lead the interpretative path toward negative connota-
tions, thus presenting the wine from a less desirable perspective. In a similar fashion,
brands like Mi nia or Chaval, which also refer to young people, may easily awake feelings
of affection and tenderness, and in turn, they appear as endearing entities that people like
to have close to them. In these latter cases, in addition, the brands also communicate the
lack of ageing of the wines by means of a metaphoric mapping between the source
domains of NIA and CHAVAL , which refer to young entities, on the one hand, and the
target domain of WINE , on the other. In the case of El Nido (The Nest), a similar metaphor
may be reached, but it involves a higher cognitive effort since it is licensed by a previous
operation of metonymic extension within the metaphoric source (i.e. CONTAINER FOR
CONTAINMENT: The nest stands for the young birds that it hosts). Not all speakers,
however, need follow this interpretative path through until the end. Some of them may
overlook the implications stemming from the underlying metonymy and simply focus
on the metaphoric connections of El Nido (The Nest) with notions of nature, landscape,
the wild, human-unaltered terroir, etc. In fact, this latter path of interpretation seems
more apt in the case of the brand under scrutiny since, unlike Mi nia and Chaval, El
Nido does not name a young wine. Both, if the speakers decipher the whole metaphor-
metonymy interaction pattern or if they stop at the metaphorical level, the connotations
arising from the brand will help to present a positive image of the target product.
As shown above, mitigation strategies (either derivational, or lexical) come forth as
useful tools for brand name creation in the Spanish corpus. By leading customers to con-
sider the product as something desirable because of its harmless, charming, and easily
controlled nature, a solicitous and well-disposed attitude is prompted on their part. The
activation of the ICM of Size by means of mitigation strategies opens up a wealth of poten-
tial positive connotations which will need to be conveniently parametrized by the context
and the nature of the specic wine under consideration. Neither all those connotation
need be activated simultaneously, not to the exclusion of others.
in order for the consumer to grasp the intended interpretation. A large group of brands in
our corpus are strengthened through the use of the Spanish augmentative sufx -n:
(5) -n (-ona): Valdubn , Buradn , Corulln
The interpretation of augmentatives, just like that of diminutives, can be shown to
hinge on the ICM of Size, whose original formulation needs to be extended in order to
account for large entities and their related cultural expectations (Ruiz de Mendoza 2000,
359):
ICM of Size
(1) Entities range in size from very small ones to very large ones.
[]
(6) A large entity is more visually noticeable.
(7) A large entity is more difcult to control.
From 6 and 7 we derive, as corollaries, opposed emotional reactions in our understand-
ing of large entities:
(8) We feel large entities as being potentially important and, therefore, likeable.
(9) We feel large entities as being potentially dangerous.
The augmentative sufx in those brands listed in (5) activates the relevant elements of
the ICM of Size (i.e. more visually noticeable, important, and, therefore, likeable), which,
after the corresponding parametrization within the context of wine culture, may lead to
activate notions of high quality, intensity and/or marked personality, among others. The
literal meaning of the augmentative, implying excessive size, is conveniently mitigated.
No one would expect a bigger bottle or a larger quantity of wine upon hearing any of
those brands. As shown by previous cognitive studies on the Spanish and English augmen-
tatives, though, their use may lead to activate the aforementioned culture-specic positive
connotations associated with the ICM of Size (see antecedents in Gooch [1970], and further
elaborations and applications to different languages of this cultural model in Santibez
[1999], Ruiz de Mendoza [2000, 2008], Soares da Silva [2008], Bagasheva [2012], and
Prez-Hernndez [2011, 2013b]).
Several brands in the corpus make use of the Latin sufx -um, originally used to form
nouns, and which may also convey the idea of something big through its sound symbo-
lism. Studies on the symbolic value of phonemes and their combination go far as back as
the works of Sapir (1927, 1929), Jespersen (1933) and Boas (1938), and they are nowadays
one of the most valued resources on which branding and marketing professionals rely in
order to create new brand names (Klink 2000, 2001; Yorston and Menon 2004; Shrum and
Lowrey 2007). In this connection, the combination of back vowels (e.g. [u]) and voiced con-
sonants (e.g. [m]) has been shown to be associated by a signicant number of speakers
with the idea of something big, heavy, or strong in languages as unrelated as American
English and Japanese (Fjeldsted 1991, 128; Nakata 2013, 48). The Latin sufx -um, there-
fore, activates the ICM of Size, and its meaning implications (i.e. important, signicant)
not through its semantics, but rather, more subtly, through the sound symbolism of its
phonetics.
(6) -um: Bassus Premium , Urium , Retum
Brands like those in (6) not only benet from the activation of the ICM of Size through
the use of the Latin sufx, but the latter also endows their nal interpretation with a taste
of the solemnity and splendor of classical culture.
138 L. PREZ-HERNNDEZ
The ICM of Size can also be exploited through lexical means, as is the case with those
wine brands that contain the adjective gran (large/big/great):
(7) Gran Claustro [Large Cloister], Gran Feudo [Large Domain/Territory]
These brands benet from the workings of the primary pragmatic function of modern
Spanish augmentatives connected with meaning intensication. The quality and the prop-
erties of the products displaying the brands in (7) are thus enhanced and reinforced. In
other cases, strengthening strategies, rather than exploiting the cultural implications of
the ICM of Size, hinge on the workings of yet another type of cognitive mechanism: com-
parison or resemblance operations (Ruiz de Mendoza 2010). The resemblance that can
sometimes be found between two independent conceptual domains licenses the use of
one of them (source domain) to talk and reason about the other (target domain). This
type of conceptual mapping has the positive side effect of enriching the semantics of
the target domain with relevant and compatible conceptual material originally belonging
to the source domain.3
Thus, according to our corpus data, comparing and conceptually linking wines, through
their brand names, with other knowledge domains that are culturally understood as maxi-
mally positive, relevant, and/or important, such as the world of royalty and nobility, arises
as yet another productive tool for brand creation. This brand design mechanism goes
hand in hand with a strengthening operation. The brand designer, by associating a
wine with a cognitive domain that refers to an outstanding cultural entity or category,
achieves his goal of presenting the target product as endowed with a top quality. This
is the case with the following wine labels, named after kings, dukes, earls, barons, and
other members of the nobility:
(8) Faustino [Spanish king], Barn de Barbn [Baron of Barbn], Marqus de Cceres
[Marquis of Cceres], Conde de Artoiz [Earl of Artoiz], Dinasta Vivanco [Vivanco
Dinasty], Excelencia de Emilio Clemente [Excellence]
This is a largely productive way of designing new wine brand names in Spanish.
Through a comparison operation, the target domain (i.e. WINE ) inherits the touch of
luxury and high quality that is generally associated with the source domain of the meta-
phor (i.e. the WORLD OF KINGS AND NOBLEMEN ). Potential consumers will, at a later stage, down-
play and parametrize these implications as needed within the context of wine
consumption (i.e. wines which are worthy of kings and aristocrats, but which are nowadays
affordable to the average consumer). In spite of the necessary mitigation, however, the
semantics of the wine brands under consideration will always retain a feeling of the rene-
ment and sumptuousness of the source domains involved.
Other lexical means which are also effectual as metaphorically based strengthening
mechanisms include the use of nouns and phrases which describe intrinsically positive,
highly valued, entities:
(9) La Faraona [The Female Pharaoh], Diamante [Diamond], La Perla del Priorat [The Pearl
of the Priorat]
These brands establish a comparison between different source domains and the target
domain of WINE , which thus inherits from the former those compatible attributes that serve
to highlight its virtues. By way of illustration consider the conceptual projection from the
domain of DIAMONDS to that of WINE . Just like diamonds belong to a category of expensive
and exclusive jewels, a wine thus named will be understood as promising a similar degree
of uniqueness and exclusivity.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 139
To end our discussion on strengthening mechanisms, let us consider the case of those
brand names literally expressing exceptional attributes such as those in (10) below:
(10) Fino To Pepe [Fine], Predilecto [Favorite], Preferido [Favorite], Vega Sicilia nico
[Vega Sicilia Unique]
These brands endow the corresponding wines with extreme attributes and qualities,
which need to be conveniently mitigated. Vega Sicilia nico, for instance, manages to
emphasize its singularity by hyperbolically claiming the uniqueness of this wine. Likewise,
Predilecto and Preferido, by referring to the fact that these wines are someones favorite,
underline their appeal.
Strengthening mechanisms, both lexical and/or derivational in nature, manage to draw
attention to either the strengths of the product, or to its most salient and relevant traits,
thus turning it into something desirable. Strengthening strategies exploit well-entrenched
social conventions and conventional emotional reactions associated with them, but in
their own particular way: while diminutives suggest likeability through minoration, aug-
mentatives do so through impressiveness.
It should also be noted that in all the examples included in our corpus, downplaying the
semantics of brands based on strengthening strategies to more realistic assessments
always results in a positive nal evaluation on the part of the consumer. This nding con-
trasts with Ruiz de Mendoza and Santibaezs (2003) proposal (see Section 4), according to
which the mitigation of hyperbolic expressions generally results in a negative evaluation of
the corresponding state of affairs. In the case of wine brands, neither the mitigation, nor
the strengthening of the non-literal scalar notion involved results in negative assessments.
As far as brand names based on strengthening strategies are concerned, this may be due
to the fact that the notions involved are all intrinsically positive in meaning (e.g. Magni-
cus, Alma, La Perla del Priorat, Gran Feudo, etc.). Thus, its mitigation does not affect its
axiologically positive value. It simply provides a more realistic and accurate interpretation
of it. In the case of those brand names involving mitigation strategies, the positive evalu-
ation has already been shown to arise from the exploitation of the ICM of Size, which
motivates the conceptualization of small things as desirable objects.
(cf. Barcelona 2003), the results reveal a 24.1% rate of overlapping among the different
categories under analysis. One hundred and eighty-one instances of cognitive operations
are found to work in combination with others rather than in isolation. Out of them, 176
instances (97.24%) correspond to combinations of mitigation and strengthening oper-
ations with other types of conceptual mechanisms. This output shows (1) that the use
of mitigation and strengthening operations is quite extended as an instrument for wine
brand name creation in Spanish, and (2) that mitigation and strengthening operations
have an almost total subsidiarity on other types of cognitive constructs. Tables 2 and 3
offer more specic information on the nature of this subsidiarity relationships, which
are especially noticeable as regards the combined used of mitigation and domain
reduction operations (e.g. La Olmedilla), on the one hand, and strengthening and com-
parison operations (e.g. La Perla del Priorat), on the other. The combination of mitigation
and comparison mechanisms (e.g. Clavelito) comes in third position. The use of mitigation
or strengthening operations in isolation from other cognitive strategies, although possible,
amounts to less than a quarter of the total number of occurrences of these two cognitive
operations in the Spanish corpus.
This preference for the combination of scalar cognitive operations, like mitigation and
strengthening, with non-scalar operations, such as metaphor (i.e. comparison/correlation)
and metonymy (i.e. domain reduction and expansion) may nd a raison dtre in the fact
that these two groups of cognitive operations fulll very different functions in human cog-
nition and communication. Thus, while metaphoric and metonymic mappings are closely
connected with the conceptualization of reality and can, thus, fulll a representational and
referential function; scalar operations (i.e. mitigation and strengthening) are linked to
alternative pragmatic factors and purposes (i.e. politeness, hyperbolic representations,
cost-benet and indirection scales, etc.). In the context of branding, their combination
is, therefore, welcomed since it helps to enhance the semantics of the brand name in
different but compatible directions.
A noticeable difference between the Spanish and American corpora, though, lies in the
extensive use that American brands make of mitigating strategies based on phrases
beyond the lexical unit (e.g. Baby Blue, Moon Puppy, Mosquito Fleet, Eye of the Needle,
Girlie Girl, etc.). Phrases of this type allow branding specialists to increase the number
and richness of the semantic associations and connotations conveyed by the brand.
Together with the sense of charm and affection transmitted through the activation of
the ICM of Size, reference to other poetically loaded words, like moon and blue, extends
the suggestive power of the brand. In addition, phrases such as Mosquito eet contribute
a humorous, ludic effect to the semantics of the brand name.
Finally, although to a lesser extent, mitigation strategies in American brands also
include the use of blends as in Zinderella (i.e. Zinfadel grape variety + Cinderella).
All in all, the range of mitigating strategies identied in the corpus of American brands
is more varied than the one found in relation to Spanish wine brands. Not only diminu-
tive sufxes and lexical items referring to small or young entities are used, but also
diminutive prexes, phrases, and blends are exploited in the realization of mitigated
brand names.
mitigation and strengthening operations. On the contrary, American labels make a smaller
use of mitigation strategies, on the one hand, and display a preference for strengthening
through the use of comparison operations (rather than through the use of other linguistic
resources), on the other (Tables 5 and 6).
brands would be fairly easy to understand by Spanish speakers, since both French and
Italian sufxes are widely recognizable to them thanks to geographical and cultural
proximity.
Wine brands based on lexical units again will be largely inter-culturally incompre-
hensible, except for those that are loanwords and/or well-known foreign words.
This is the case with Baby Blue and Mi nia, and partially with Mosquito Fleet and
Girlie Girl, but not so with Moon Puppy, Chaval or El Nido, for example. The difculty
of using brands inter-culturally without encountering comprehension problems
increases with those labels based on longer phrases (e.g. Eye of the Needle). It is inter-
esting to note, however, that these strategies are common among American wine
brand setters, with California wines gathering pace on an international scale, and
also timidly, though increasingly, being used by some of the most modern Spanish
wineries (e.g. Spanish White Guerrilla). This suggests that the understanding of the
literal meaning of the brand is one factor, but not the only one inuencing brand effec-
tiveness. A more detailed study of brand names using language-specic lexical units
and phrases would be needed in order to unveil the reasons why some of these
brands are still successful in spite of being semantically obscure for speakers of
other languages.
(7) Strengthening strategies based on the Latin sufx -um will be mutually comprehensi-
ble for both Spanish and American consumers, while the use of the native Spanish
augmentative sufx -n will only make sense for Spanish-speaking wine purchasers.
Strengthening strategies based on the use of intensication adjectives and adverbs
will be largely productive in both languages since most of the lexical items involved
have a Latin root that is mutually comprehensible for consumers in the Spanish and
American markets (e.g. Grand-Gran, Abundantly-Abundantemente, Major-Mayor, etc.).
Other American and Spanish brands based on lexical strategies that exploit the ICM
of Size through comparison operations will only be translatable between the two
languages in as far as the particular lexical items at stake are transparent to speakers
of the two languages -due to their similarity, or because they are well-known foreign
words or loanwords. Thus, wine brands such as Tudor, Diamond, Excelencia or
Ambassador will be productive in both markets, while others like Abotts Table or
La Faraona will only be comprehensible to consumers of American and Spanish
markets, respectively. Another point of convergence between the strengthening strat-
egies found in both corpora is the use of Latin words expressing optimal and excep-
tional attributes (e.g. Optima, Magnicus, etc.). This represents yet another strategy
which facilitates inter-cultural intelligibility.
(8) Together with the above implications for the branding industry, the present study also
sheds light on aspects of cognitive modeling that are in need of further exploration.
The analysis carried out in relation to American and Spanish wine brands offers
further support to the universality of cognitive operations. However, even though
they are available to speakers worldwide, our study also points to specic outputs
for their interaction with (1) language-specic pragmatic principles, and (2) concrete
linguistic genres.
Regarding the rst, our data show a more extensive use of strengthening mechan-
isms in isolation from other cognitive operations in Spanish than in American wine
brands (cf. Tables 3 and 6). This is easily tied to the workings of the Politeness Principle.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 147
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant
number FFI2013-43593-P].
Notes
1. Since diminutives involve a downscaling of the attributes of an entity, the brands based on this
linguistic realization procedure exploit the Modesty Maxim by presenting themselves as small
and unimportant (and thus, maximizing dispraise of themselves). However, diminutives, as shall
be shown in Sections 5.1 and 6.1., simultaneously exploit the ICM of Size, according to which
small and unimportant things are often seen as harmless, desirable, and/or appealing (see
Section 4.3).
2. The ubiquity of the Idealized Cognitive Model of Size is a theoretical construct that has not yet been
ascertained or refuted through empirical analysis. Its formulation has been made in relation to
Western cultures (Europe, North-America) and it is, therefore, useful for the analysis of the
Spanish and American brands under consideration, but its full cultural scope is yet to be
determined.
3. This being one of the fundamental tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory within Cognitive
Linguistics (cf. Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff and Turner 1989, and refer-
ences therein).
4. Comparison and correlation operations are two subtypes of the traditional umbrella term
cognitive metaphor (Lakoff 1987). Domain expansion and reduction operations correspond to
part-for-whole and whole-for-part cognitive metonymies (see Prez-Hernndez 2013a for an
exhaustive description of these four types of cognitive operations and their role in wine
branding).
148 L. PREZ-HERNNDEZ
5. Although the use of French, Italian, and Spanish diminutives is likely to have some meaning
effects on the overall interpretation of the brand, as we have theoretically speculated in the
text above, the nature and scope of the specic associations and connotations that may
derive from them should be the object of more ne-grained empirical work based on the statisti-
cal treatment of consumers answers to specically-targeted queries and questionnaires.
6. An additional reason for using French, Italian, and Spanish diminutive sufxes may well be that
brands with overtones from these languages may benet from the connotations of exclusivity
and top quality that the wines from the corresponding countries have already earned.
Notes on contributor
Lorena Prez Hernndez, Ph.D., works as a permanent lecturer at the University of La Rioja
(Spain) since 2001. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Review of Cognitive Lin-
guistics (RCL), the Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy (John Benjamins), the Journal
of English Studies (JES), and American Journal of Linguistics (AJL).
Her present research interests include aspects of cognitive and functional semantics.
She has looked into issues of grammatical metaphor and metonymy from a cross-linguistic
perspective, as well as into cognitive and constructional aspects of speech acts. Simul-
taneously, she has also investigated the metaphorical grounding of modals in Spanish,
French, English, and Italian. She has published over 30 papers in high-impact international
journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Cognitive Linguis-
tics, and Applied Linguistics. At present she collaborates with Lexicon Branding, Co. (Sau-
salito, USA) as a linguist consultant in the assessment of new commercial brands.
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