The Cultural Linguistics perspective on the conceptualisation of clothing terminology

By stemming from the theoretical assumptions that cognitive reality is the outcome of culture and that language is intimately structured and bound to embodied experience, the present study attempts to contribute to the notion of Cultural Cognition (Sharifian 2013) through close inspection on the less investigated issue that correlates the cultural conceptualisation of clothes and the conceptualisation of the body and its arrangement in space. A dataset of clothing terminology retrieved from The Fairchild Books Dictionary of Fashion (Tortora & Keiser 2014) is assembled to show how such terms are coined in accordance with concepts related to cultural and spatial experience. It is shown that cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian 2017) and idealised cognitive models (Johnson 2007) shape the construction of meaningful lexemes in clothing terminology, and they prove to be explanatory means to achieve an understanding of the complex system of knowledge that comes into play when we coin and understand such terms.