Genericization refers to the process by which a brand name changes from specific in reference and representative of a single product by a particular company (e.g. Xerox photocopiers, or more recently, Google search engine) to a generic form representative of the entire semantic class to which that product belongs (a xerox, to xerox, or to google). This paper will give an overview of a theory first offered by Clankie (1999) to account for the changes seen in genericization, along with what has been learned in the ten years since the theory was first released.
Key words:
genericization, brand names, language change, actuation
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