Underwear as overwear: Spatial particles in English fashion compounds

This study investigates the use of spatial particles in the formation of English compounds in fashion language. Spatial particles such as under, over, or out are frequent compound constituents in English (Bauer 2013, 2018), and some scholars even consider them “native locative prefixes” (e.g. Bauer et al. 2013: 340-342, 452) on account of their productivity in the formation of nouns such as underwear, overwear, and outfit. Yet, some of these particles are also found in “prepositional compounds” (Bauer et al. 2013: 453-454) derived by conversion from phrasal verbs, such as the nouns push-up and pullo-ver obtained from the respective verbs. This study examines a set of nominal compounds drawn from Victoria’s Secret and H&M websites in order to inspect the relevance of spatial particles to the creation of English fashion terms. Fashion spatial compounds are rich in English, especially nominal com-pounds that exhibit a location-located semantic structure, such as beach dress and topcoat (Biscetti & Baicchi 2019). This study focus-es on nominal compounds exhibiting spatial particles, in that words related to clothes or accessories need to be located with respect to other garments (underskirt) or human body (backpack). The main aims of the study are: (1) to provide a morphosyntactic and mor-phosemantic analysis of English fashion prepositional compounds, and (2) to categorise them in terms of transparency, compositionali-ty, headedness, productivity, and analogy. The results from a corpus analysis (COCA, Davies 2008) show the relevance of spatial particles related to the vertical axis (under, over), which in fashion terminolo-gy have become productive compound constituents (Bauer 2001; Mattiello 2017).