Naming and appellative constructs in law, finance and banking

Abstract

Bringing together Oxford handbooks, companions and quick references, the Oxford References platform (OR) provides ample and authoritative – hence, trustworthy (Origgi 2013) – coverage of a number of subjects, including Law, Finance and Banking.  In this paper, we compare and contrast the functions (Jackendoff 2010, adapted) that fill out semantic relations in complex nominal and naming constructs (compounds and phrases) collected from the macro- and microstructures of Johnathan Law’s bestselling A Dictionary of Law (2018, 9 ed.; ODL) and A Dictionary of Finance and Banking (2018, 9 ed.; ODFB). The main emphasis lies on naming and appellative (van Langendonck 2007; van Langendonck, van de Velde 2016) constructs (Booij 2010) with names as modifiers. Qualitative data analysis shows that metonymy plays a key role in naming, not only in ODL, but also in ODFB. Yet, in ODFB metonymy is also found to account for a shift from the argument-modifier schema or the CAUSE and COMMEMORATIVE functions (‘be named after’; Schlücker 2016) to EPITHETS (Breban 2018) and TYPIFYING uses (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2013), whenever associative meanings and complex descriptions enter into the picture. Also, metaphor appears to motivate appellative and naming constructs in finance and banking, though not in law