• a clear understanding of the basic theoretical and methodological concepts and principles presented during the course
• ability to formulate and systematically pursue a set of clear research questions relative to the self-chosen exam case in accordance with established academic norms in either Danish or English
• hands-on skills in evaluating and performing creative wordmaking for commercial and/or organizational purposes as practiced in case-based excercises in class.

Background

What were smartphones, Apps, sneakers and Alzheimer's disease (and drugs against it) before they became known as... exactly that? “Having a name for it” is not just a matter of putting labels on objects and phenomena in the infinite variety of reality. It is a matter of categorizing such objects and phenomena, (re)identifying them at each new encounter, making sense of them, and encompassing them into our minds by relating them to our reasoning, values, and personal goals. In all but a trivial sense, this is tantamount to creating them as objects of human thought, desire, and action. When planted in the minds of other people, they will be remembered and affect the way they see things, possibly overshadowing competing names and other ways of seeing the “same” things. In turn, any act of naming involves framing in two distinct, but closely related respects. First, the origin, composition, and sometimes even sound of a new name will often frame whatever it denotes in a certain way, adding particular shades of meanings and positive or negative value to it, e.g. Nicotinell, Whopper, green taxes, humanitarian bombings, or lame duck. Yet since a name cannot “say” everything in itself, the final outcome will also strongly depend on how the name itself is framed by other words and sentences in the surrounding discourse, and by pictures, films, commercials, real-live events, packaging design and a host of other possible cues, including by people’s first-hand experiences with whatever the name is applied to. This is what has turned McDonalds into more than just some Anglo-American family name and what makes many people understand global warming as a threat to humanity rather than an opportunity to develop seaside resort tourism in Northern countries.

State of the art

The importance of naming and framing decisions is highly appreciated in a number of practice-oriented fields spanning from innovative product development, marketing, branding, and advertising to corporate communication, PR, lobbyism, politics, journalism, didactics and the development of professional terminologies. However, with a few exceptions, the issue is dealt with on a “strategic” level while the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms determining the success or failure of particular innovations pursuing particular purposes is mostly approached in anecdotic common-sense terms. Nevertheless, essential analytical tools and empirical insights are available in more fundamental directions of language and cognition research on when and how people spontaneously interpret and accept or reject unfamiliar words and word combinations, how surrounding verbal and visual cues can affect these processes, and how the typological specifics of different languages and language types can provide different conditions for successful naming and framing strategies across cultures.

Aims and content

The course aims at presenting some of the abovementioned insights in a concise and comprehensive form and relate them to the real-life naming and framing challenges encountered in the practice-oriented fields mentioned initially.

The course will supply the participants with analytical skills and operational tools that will enable them to contribute constructively and suggest new ideas for the planning, implementation and evaluation of naming and framing decisions for a variety of purposes in private and public enterprises.

A main focus will be the creation of names for novel products and their capability of affecting product and brand identity. Further topics include the use of naming and framing techniques in public issues management (by some called “spin”) and in cross-cultural communication, e.g., the management of global brands.The domains addressed may, within reasonable limits, encompass suggestions and input from the participants in view of their lines of study and general interests.

In terms of disciplines, the course integrates theoretical and empirical research from the fields of experimental psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and knowledge management with goal-driven research into product naming and branding, communicative fairness, and other issues of interest. A key focus is the interplay between the built-in semantic potential of the name itself and the additional stimuli (framing) that affect people’s online sense-making and gradual concept formation when encountering it in running discourse. The latter span from the ongoing negotiation of political buzzwords in mass media to the framing of innovative food products through words, texts and images on the product packaging.

Aitchison, J. (2012). Words in the mind. An introduction to the mental lexicon. Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Benches, R. (2006). Creative compounding in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gill, T. & El Gamal, M. (2014), "Does exposure to dogs (cows) increase the preference for Puma (the color white)? Not always,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 31, 125-126.

Gill, T. & Dubé, L. (2007). “What is a leather iron or a bird phone? Using conceptual combinations to generate and understand new product concepts”. Journal of Consumer Psychology 17(3), 202-217.

Riezebos, R. (2003). Brand Management: A Theoretical and Practical Approach. London:Prentice Hall. 

Smith, V.; Zlatev, J.; & Barratt, D. (2014). "Unpacking noun-noun compounds: Interpreting novel and conventional food names in isolation and on food labels." Cognitive Linguistics 25 (1), 99-147.