現代アメリカ英語における商品名を表す名詞の分析 : その「総称化」プロセスと社会・文化的背景 <学位論文要旨>

In this dissertation, we investigated linguistic and cultural aspects of brand name nouns based on a corpus established from various sources and responses to questionnaires distributed in the U.S. Our findings show that brand name nouns are changing grammatically in contemporary American English reflecting their frequent use in everyday life. First, we reviewed previous studies on brand name nouns and noted that more deliberate investigations regarding syntax, semantics, morphology, and sociocultural aspects were necessary. Second, linguistic properties of brand name nouns were examined, especially in terms of their countability. We showed that brand name nouns have the same linguistic features as common nouns regarding countability from a cognitive point of view. Third, as the main part of this thesis, Clankie's (2002) theory of “genericization" was discussed by examining the four hypotheses that the theory relies on, and an alternative model for “genericization" was proposed. Finally, we presented qualitative studies on Hoover [hoover] and the “X-ed out" construction. We revealed how the former full-fledged brand name noun goes through all processes of “genericization" and creates metaphoric expressions in various contexts, and also demonstrated that the latter construction is very productive in that it provides a grammatical framework to promote conversion from a noun into a verb.