On Different Ways of Classifying Fashion-Clothing Terminology

Abstract

So far, different authors have dealt with the two inseparable phenomena related to fashion and clothing mainly from the semiotic, ethnological, sociological and/or artistic viewpoints, while the morphological, lexical-semantic or lexicographic analyses of lexical items considering the semantic field of fashion-clothing words are either insufficient or inaccurate in the Croatian language. Therefore, the linguistic-normative analysis of these terms first requires their classification. This paper proposes three ways of classifying fashion-clothing terminology by using the fashion journals from the period when their publication started in Croatian (around 1918) and comparing it to the present situation. One of the classifications, determined by the selected corpus, is called the classification based on the typical element of formula referring to the written clothing, which is in compliance with Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory on the structure of visual and written clothing item. The second possible way is to start from semantic fields, while the third way of paradigmatic lexical hierarchisation includes taxonomies, hyponymies and meronymies. These systems, classifying the lexis according to the relations of superordination and differentiation (being superordinate and different), actually represent the ways in which speakers categorise the world of their own experience.