Individual License Plates of Vehicles in the Communicative and Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

The article focuses on analyzing personalized license plates issued for vehicles of individuals and legal entities. A made-to-order plate is an official identification of a car or motorcycle on the roads of Ukraine. The article argues that these license plates demonstrate the owner’s linguistic creativity and represent a unique form of communication within the Ukrainian society. While standard license plates provided by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine are impersonal and only serve to link a vehicle to its owner and a region of its registration, a personalized plate serves as a way for individuals to express their desire to engage in communication with the social world around them, conveying unique information about their linguistic identity. The message conveyed by the license plate demonstrates practicality and social norms. The need to interact with a broad spectrum of potential readers is determined by such social needs as survival, cooperation, support, respect, belonging to a particular community, creating a community, following trends, self-expression, self-affirmation, etc. The sign on the license plate may be motivated or unmotivated to its recipient. The form of the text is letters in either upper or lower case in Latin or Cyrillic, individual digits, or combinations of these. Structurally, the sign can be a word, abbreviation, formula, phrase, sentence, or letters combined with figures.

The main features of the concept of "personalized license plate" are subjectivity, officialness, individuality, informativeness, symbolism, evaluation, emotionality, expressiveness, intentionality, and self-presentation. It is a complex cognitive structure of knowledge about an object of the material world, which is an integral part of any mechanical vehicle. The concept is formed where the concepts of "vehicle", "owner", "sign", and "state" overlap due to metonymic relations. The semantic classification of license plates was carried out on the basis of reference, such as the names of people, surnames, nicknames, company names, brands, platforms, cafes, restaurants, mythical creatures, natural phenomena, movies, substances, sounds of nature, etc. Besides, our view is that license plates in the form of letter and number combinations designed to evoke beauty in recipients encompass numerological knowledge that necessitates specific understanding and decoding techniques.