The paper focuses on artifact denominations – compound idiomatic phrases that encode the information on a person’s anthropometric characteristics (those of body, virtues, behavior, etc.) in artifact‑naming items (based on the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages). The study elaborates on the system of significative and denotative descriptors – two‑component entities that represent a metaphoric mapping of the source (significative descriptors) and target (denotative descriptors) domains. The significative descriptors are reduced to the classes of the artifact signifiers; among those are the classes of clothes, household articles, food, weapon, facilities, transport and symbols. The denotative descriptors represent the classes of the artifact signified; among those are the classes of a person’s social, value‑based and semiotic characteristics. The ultimate goal of the study is to characterize regular relations between the two classes of descriptors in the contrasted languages. The analysis provided in the paper proceeds from the assumption that any artifact‑naming process takes place on the basis of extended stereotyping – a cognitive mechanism that provides for the encoding of additional, complementary senses in artifact‑naming items. The study concludes that artifact‑naming processes in the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages respond to the communities’ demands for representing a person’s internal, spiritual world within the concept of external material objects (artifacts). The analysis reveals the tendency of artifact designations towards a social, axiological and semiotic conceptualization of a person’s artifact world.

The article consists of two parts. In the first one (introductory) I recall—following Edmund Husserl, Stanisław Ossowski and Adam Schaff—the main formulations of the “principle of transparency of the sign.” In these formulations it is usually said about (1) the transparency of the sign regarding objects denoted by the sign (denoted, designated and/or named), or (2) the transparency of the sign regarding its meaning (respectively, events, states of affairs and facts designated by the sign). However, as Husserl pointed out, one can also speak about (3) the transparency of the sign in relations to the activities and mental states of the sign’s users (senders and recipients). After all, only due to the transparency of the sign understood in this way, it is possible for people to communicate with each other, thus the sign can also has an expressive and communicative function. In turn, the second part of the article (essential) contains a reconstruction of the Leon Koj’s approach; Koj gave a consistently formalized form to the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency— the form of an axiomatized logical system (using Quine's formalism from his Mathematical Logic). One of Koj's main goals was also to indicate the close relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and even the primacy of pragmatics over semantics. Formal-logical tools have also shown that the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency neither contravene The Law of Non-Contradiction (at least in its psychological formulation), nor contain or imply semantic antinomies such us antinomy of the liar. Because it is a theory easily negotiable with Alfred Tarski’s theory of language levels.