Hyphenated Phrasal Expressions in Fashion Journalism: A Diachronic Corpus-assisted Study of Vogue Magazine

Abstract

Following Barthes’s seminal Système de la Mode, there have been relatively few studies focusing on fashion journalism from a linguistic perspective. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of hyphenated phrasal expressions (HPEs) of three or more constituents in the American edition of Vogue. The Vogue corpus covers a timeframe from 2003 to 2019 to provide diachronic insights. Corpus software was used to extract and analyse all hyphenated phrasal expressions. Results showed a general rise in usage over time, with most functioning as adjectives in line with the descriptive and evaluative purposes of fashion journalism. A wide range of structural patterns reflected richly detailed and striking mental images (i.e., *-and-*, *-meets-*), multiple roles (i.e., *-slash-*, NP-NP-NP), and novelty [(*)-of-the-moment, *-to-be]. Extensive clause-like HPEs offered a particularly interesting window on the writing talents of this discourse community. The study provides a useful benchmark for contrastive studies aiming to understand to what extent HPE usage in American Vogue may influence the writing style of journalists of other language backgrounds, with particular reference to Italian fashion journalism.

English complex premodifiers and their German and Swedish correspondences

“…The above examples in (1)-( 4) seem to correlate with the functions of English hyphenated premodifiers that have been addressed in previous studies: (I) that of expressing colourfulness and wittiness (Meibauer, 2007;Rush, 1998;Crawford Camiciottoli, 2020), as in (1) and (2), and (II) that of condensing texts (Biber et al, 1999: 536;Ljung, 2000;Pastor-Gomez, 2011: 57), as in (3) and (4). Thus, it seems likely that the correspondences used for non-fiction structures would be of a slightly different nature than those used for the more creative fiction instances, where focus is more on stylistic considerations than on semantic equivalence and condensation.…”

“…Hyphenated premodifiers (Levin and Ström Herold, 2017) have been discussed under a number of headings, such as 'premodifying compounds' (Quirk et al, 1985(Quirk et al, : 1569, 'compound premodifiers' (Rush, 1998), 'compound adjectival premodifiers' (Ljung, 2000), 'phrasal compounds' (Meibauer, 2007;Trips, 2012;Bauer et al, 2013) and '(adjectival) hyphenated phrasal expressions' (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2020). As already indicated in Section 1, these premodifiers range from shorter two-part premodifiers, both conventionalized, (3) and ( 4), and more creative instances (1), to longer multi-word occurrences, as in (2), that appear to be produced on the fly -or, in the words of Bauer and Renouf (2001: 108) -where "a piece of syntax […] has been captured to be a premodifier".…”