Search

Clothing names as a means of linguo-semiotic coding of conceptual information // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2025. Issue 4 (46). P. 58-78

Modern intercultural education involves integrating language and culture in the educational process. For this purpose, it is necessary to develop descriptive models of the cultural code, which would include a verbal and non-verbal component. The idea of connotative semiotics by L. Hjelmslev can serve as the basis for such a model. Names of clothes and clothes themselves as a social and cultural code – how are they related? This is the question we are trying to answer. R. Barthes made a similar attempt in The System of Fashion, but in his concept, clothes are only an expression of fashion as a quasi-value of bourgeois society. We partially use Barthes’ terminology, but we explore the code of clothes without imposed connotations. The “real” clothing code is a visual code, where clothing itself is a sign. However, an object cannot signify itself, so the content of the sign in this case is different from clothing. But this is not the entire outside world, as Barthes claims. We believe that clothing as a sign defines a person, and all other meanings derive from this. Clothing can indicate a social status, a role, personal qualities, group membership, and express any of these meanings as an abstract idea. According to Saussure’s theory, the signifier of a word is an acoustic image, while the signified is a mental representation of an object or concept. The content of a linguistic sign is not identical to the object itself, and the concept serves as a necessary link. The importance of a concept is not obvious to a native speaker, who sees a direct connection between a word and a thing, but it becomes noticeable when languages are compared. Differences in the ways of understanding objective realities are expressed in the discrepancy between the signs of the real and verbal codes, the presence of non-equivalent units and lacunae, as well as in incomplete equivalence, and semantic differences are possible not only in connotations, but also in the conceptual core. When comparing Russian and Chinese, we find that Russian names for clothing define it as either male or female, but this meaning is not reflected in the structure of the word. In Chinese, the name of a piece of clothing either contains the corresponding marker or is gender-neutral. The meaning of a clothing name can refer either to the item of clothing or to its cultural significance, in the latter case, a connotation arises. However, the meaning of a word is only revealed in context. The minimum context that can reveal both sides of a “real” sign in a language is a syntactic construction that describes a person based on their clothing. There are three types of such constructions in Russian: predicative description, non-predicative description, and metonymy. The second option, “человек/люди в...”, appears to be the most promising in terms of study. This construction can be used to comprehensively represent the clothing code (including both non-verbal and verbal components) in the context of teaching Russian as a foreign language.

Keywords: connotative semiotics, clothing names, vestimentary code, real code, verbal code, connotation, concept, Russian, Chinese, language teaching