Although fashion is a topic of chief relevance in our society, its linguistic characteristics have attracted little attention among researchers. Facing the challenge of combining two different, but arguably complementary, perspectives -the Frame-Based Terminology model and Relevance Theory -, this paper focuses on English and French neologisms in the language of fashion. The data, extracted from top quality Spanish women's fashion magazines, have been examined as signals of specialised language. The analysis shows that the correct interpretation of the terms rests on a specific set of relations and roles, but also on their lexical expansion, which satisfies the expectations of expert readers and general public.

This paper explores the persuasive power of phraseological units (PUs) in cosmetics leaflets written either in English or French, together with their translation into French or English, respectively, as well as into Spanish.The approach rests upon, firstly, the concept of genre, determined, in agreement with Swales (1990), on the basis of the purpose of the text. Cosmetics leaflets are argued to be a manifestation of advertising. Hence, their ultimate aim is to persuade the (potential) buyer about the benefits of the product. Secondly, the occurrence of the phraseological units in this type of genre has important consequences for rhetoric and stylistics. Thirdly, we deal with the definition of phraseological units and their relation to metaphor, which will permit us to study how persuasion is achieved through this particular text type. Finally, by comparing the source text with its translation into two other languages, we analyse whether the translator has grasped the stylistic effect of the phraseological units and has succeeded in conveying a similar value in the target language text.

In this paper we examine the addresser' s attempt at gaining the addressee' s attention towards his message. The field chosen for the investigation is the language of advertising, and more particularly one of its effective, although not widely used, strategies: humour. The hypothesis we put forward is that humour arises as a consequence of flouting the communicative rules. Inthis way, readers may develop afeeling of solidarity with the advertiser for being daring or interesting, and above all for letting them' in the know'. Thus the use of humour is studied as a persuasive tactic.

ResumenEn este artículo se intenta probar que la teoría de la Relevancia de Sperber & Wilson ttene que ser reforzada con una teorla psicollngüística del procesamiento del lenguaje para explicar de forma satisfactoria los dobles sentidos. Para ello se sugiere un análisis comparativo (inglés-espaftol) en tres niveles de ambigtledad: sintáctica. semántica y fonética.Palabras clave: Relevancia, procesamiento, ambigtlcdad, garden-path', publicidad. SummaryThis papcr tries to provc that Sperber & Wilson's Rc1evance Theory needs to be 1mplemented with a psycholingu1stic theory of language processing in arder to cffcctively account for punnmg. To sce the cxtcnt of this claim I suggest a crosslínguist1c comparison (English-Spanish) at thrce leve Is of ambiguity: syntactic, lexical and phonetic.