Trademarks and other proprietary terms

Especially in North America, trademark litigation constitutes a prominent area of applied linguistics. As legal consultants, linguists bring their professional expertise to bear upon three issues: (1) likelihood of confusion of two marks; (2) categorization of the strength of a mark with respect to its place on a continuum of semantic/pragmatic categories technically labeled “generic,” “descriptive,” “suggestive,” “fanciful,” and “arbitrary”; and (3) propriety of a mark, that is, whether it is “scandalous,” or “disparaging.” Consulting linguists typically write descriptive reports that analyze the linguistic facts underlying the issues of particular cases – sometimes in rebuttal to other linguists’ reports. Often, linguists are also called upon to give sworn testimony based upon the reports they have prepared.