Multilingual Car Stickers with Text: Linguopragmatic and Legal Perspectives

Abstract

The paper is devoted to a linguistic analysis of stickers with verbal signs, purposefully applied to different parts of cars to distinguish them from other vehicles. Stickers on a car are a design solution by individuals and legal entities to make it unique and original. The stickers were classified based on the global pragmatic goals of the addressees of such communicative messages to the social world: compliance with the law, promotion of goods and/or services, and personal free expression. Accordingly, they can be classified as formal, or official, informal, or decorative types of stickers. The verbal signs are a direct incentive for the addressee to come into contact with the inscription made by the addressee and react (think, feel, act) in a certain way. In this way, one more fragment of the ethnic communicative space of Ukrainian society is created. The paper shows that while compliance with the law involves the use of standardised stickers, advertising and self-expression are characterised by more or less free linguistic creativity. If the promotion of a product or service is aimed at satisfying social needs for the sake of survival, financial success, self-affirmation, etc., the need for decorative verbal markings of a car is due to the existing needs for self-expression, respect, belonging to a certain community, etc. Verbal labels are nominative (words, abbreviations, shortenings) and communicative (phrases, sentences, small texts) signs in Germanic, Slavic and Latin, displayed in different colours, fonts and sizes on the car glass or body. In this way, the main communicative signal is reinforced, namely the idea of why this or that sticker was created. In terms of pragmatics, the identified intentions (the list of which is far from being exhaustive), realising the Ego of individuals, actually reveal different aspects of their personalities – people express their attitude to many fragments of this multifaceted world through the corresponding stickers. One of the main intentions is to express their negative attitude to the war, love for their Motherland, and the vision of Ukraine in Europe.