Text In Advertisement

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the problems of advertising text studies, text stylistics, pragmatic effects, genre classification and to coverage of the problems associated with the pragmastylistic features of commercial and scientific and technical advertising messages. In the modern world, the importance of advertising communication increases. And the success of a pragmatic perception of texts depends on the correct interpretation. Studies conducted in the field of advertising discourse are widely represented in communicative linguistics, but in our work, we will describe in detail the genres and styles of this discourse in the aspect of pragmatic perception. The pragmatic aspects of advertisement are traditionally the object of linguistic research. In our work, their communicative potential is examined with examples of commercial and scientific and technical advertising. Stylistic features of advertisement are constantly in the focus of attention of linguists. In this study, we combine the analysis of the pragmatic and stylistic aspects of advertising texts, deducing the author's definition of pragmastylistics. The scope of a commercial advertisement is advertising any objects connected to material and ideal realities. The topic in this area can be any objects, ideas, services. Based on the study, the team of authors considers it possible to include the research materials in the courses "Styles of advertising graphics", "Theory of translation", "Psycholinguistics and advertising text", practical training courses for copywriters, practical translation courses. The obtained data can also be used in the work of advertising agencies in order to maximise the effectiveness of the advertising impact.

Keywords: Advertising textpragmaticsstylisticscommercialscientific and technical advertisement

Introduction

Text is a product of a speech-making process. It has completeness, it is objectified in the form of a written document and literary processed in accordance with the type of the document. It consists of a name (title) and a number of special units (supra-phrasal unities) united by different types of lexical, grammatical, logical, stylistic connection, and has a specific orientation and pragmatic attitude (Galperin, 2006).

The category of information covers a number of problems which go beyond purely linguistic nature. One of them is the problem of the new (something unknown). Obviously, the new cannot be considered apart from taking into account the social, psychological, scientific and technical, cultural, age, time and other factors. For one recipient, the message would be new and therefore include information, for another, the same message would be deprived of information because they already know the content of the message or do not understand it. It is now fairly well recognised that text is not a purely linguistic, but also a pragmatic, psychological and speech category. Therefore, text as a unit of communication should occupy one of the central places in science which will consider in more detail the process of communication in human society.

Problem Statement

The object of the research is texts taken from media and scientific and technical literature.

Research Questions

The main research question is the investigation of expressive means in commercial and scientific and technical advertising texts.

The scope of a commercial advertisement is "advertising, i.e., presentation of the facts about any objects of material and ideal reality to the addressee. The topic in the area can be any objects, ideas, services" (Mutovina, 2001, p. 105).

Following Tonkova (1980), we note the purpose and objectives of commercial advertisement: 1) the desire of the advertiser to convince the addressee of the "ideality" of the advertised object by strengthening the imagery and emotionality in the advertising presentation. 2) the predominance of the appeal of the addressee to various actions.

Method of communication in commercial advertising: visual and written distant communication which has the features of oral communication.

Characterising scientific and technical advertisement, Mutovina (2001) distinguishes its public field of activity — advertising of the objects of the scientific and technical sphere of activity: results of scientific and technical researches, the introduction of technical and technological innovations, rendering of technical services, advertising of scientific and technical and reference literature. The theme of advertising — objects of material reality, which are the results of research and development work.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the research is the comprehensive study of pragmastylistic characteristics of advertising texts. Achieving this aim involves the following objectives: 1) disclosure of the advertising features as one of the types of the discourse; 2) determination of style and genre features in commercial and scientific and technical advertising texts; 3) identification of the perception stages of expressive means used in advertising texts.

Research Methods

In accordance with the aim and the objectives this paper analyses, the methods and techniques of the research of advertising text were analysed. They were based on the usage of contextual and pragmastylistic methods. Stylistically coloured advertising conveys something common to all people, regardless of their geolocation, which allows, due to the expressive and evaluative component to interpret it in one way or another. The use of contextual and pragmastylistic methods allows adapting advertisement to the peculiarities of one or another community.

Modern advertising texts are an important source of scientific reflections. At the moment, we can state the fact that a certain advertising space has already been formed, which has its own laws of speech creation, its own rules of communication. The founder of advertising D. Ogilvi and his supporters drew attention to the close relationship and interaction of elements in the chain "individual — their thinking — their behaviour".

Golev (2003) considers "advertising as a socio-cultural variety of texts" and as a "polyphonic discourse", secondary in its Genesis and complex in its structure, which distinguishes "two strategies of linguistic analysis of the discussed text: formally semantical and pragmatic" (para. 7).

"Written text as a link of communication can be defined as a set of meanings of language signs and reflections of the emotional and rational energies of the sender in the consciousness of the addressee. Strictly speaking, the "life of the text" occurs only in the process of reading it by the addressee. Therefore, it is necessary to speak about the ability of the text to excite emotions in the reader's consciousness, which are the manifestation of the reader’s psychic energy.

In this regard, it is appropriate to replace the term "energy of the text" with the term "energy of the text perception by the addressee" which reveals the content and the feature of the defined phenomenon more precisely" (Myshkina, 1998, p. 35).

Energy of the text perception – text ability to determine a measure of the flow intensity of vital processes in the addressee's consciousness. It is caused by the syntactic, semantic, phonetic and rhythmic characteristics of the text which influence the reader's consciousness (Myshkina, 1998).

According to its goals, advertising is usually divided into informative, exhortative (creating a selective demand, forming preferences for the goods' brands) and reminding (maintaining awareness of the product at the stage of maturity of the company).

Out of the advertising works variety, the most promising in terms of genres are verbal products, i.e., those in which the verbal text predominantly prevails over the image.

 Advertising in its genre specificity is divided into print, outdoor, television and radio advertising, and in the area of operation - into commercial, scientific and technical, social and political. Describing the area of the advertisement functioning, it is impossible not to mention the accompanying effects.

Kokhtev (1989) distinguishes the following effects in advertising: the effect of verbal clarity, the effect of thinking, the effect of trust, the effect of controversy, the effect of direct conversation, the effect of presence, the effect of gradual amplification, the effect of deceived expectations.

Advertisement, using the words, operates with their specific content and imagery, i.e. the effect of emotional empathy. The emotionally written text causes an emotional reaction of readers. Emotions serve to regulate the behaviour aimed at satisfying our needs. The text written in this way affects the content and dynamics of perception, attention, imagination, memory, thinking. The effect of verbal clarity is directly associated with the effect of reflections, i.e., when we prove a certain position that reveals the inner essence of objects and phenomena (Kokhtev, 1989).

This effect is based on the logic of reasoning and is associated with the content. For the addressee who has read and “reworked” the advertising text, the effect of trust, which is directly related to authoritative opinion, is of great importance.

 The effect of direct conversation is based on the effect of controversy and leads to the dialogue of the advertising text. Dialogue is defined as a form of speech in which there is a direct exchange of statements between two or more individuals. Of course, in the advertising text most often not the dialogue in its pure form is used, but the elements of the dialogue, for example, the question-answer form. Although dialogue as a form of communication, being used partly in the texts of advertising, it retains its own peculiarities there,

firstly, a dialogue is speech supported. This means that the copywriter speaks and talks to the reader, who "poses" questions to him. Thus, the potential consumer is involved in an interesting conversation. Secondly, the dialogue is conducted with an emotional and expressive contact of the speakers. From this, it follows that questions should cause an emotional reaction from the interlocutors. There is a communication copywriter with a potential consumer. The advertising word serves to persuade and transmit some information. (Kokhtev, 1989, p. 96)

"Polemics forms our consciousness, helps to understand the essence of the phenomenon, to understand the truth of information. The course of reflection allows the potential consumer to develop a conscious view on the advertised object, allows to convince him of the correctness of advertising.

Polemic orientation is a powerful lever to activate the interest and attention of the reader of advertisement, a means of persuasion. It is able to transform curiosity, passing interest in sustained interest (Kokhtev, 1989).

Focusing on the effect of presence, Kokhtev (1989) notes: "a potential consumer becomes a participant in the action associated with the advertised object. He seems to be immersed in the atmosphere that surrounds the object of advertisement, becoming itself an active participant" (p. 64).

Speaking about the effect of gradual strengthening, we follow Kokhtev (1989) who associates this effect with the pragmatics of perception. Kokhtev associates it with the natural physiological processes of assimilation of information. As you know, even the most interesting form and content of advertisement, especially if it is a large text, by themselves cannot provide a constant tension of attention in the reading process, so there is a temporary loss of attention, if the reader receives the same or similar elements of information.

Further Kokhtev (1989) evaluated the effect of failed expectations, focusing on its merits – "the challenge, the surprise, the unpredictability that helps to kindle the curiosity of potential customers and to increase their perception."

The presence of several content plans in the advertising text is due to the need to influence the audience. However, the aesthetic development of the recipient of speech is not included in the primary task of advertising, but the diversity, imagery content allow the advertiser to express the main idea succinctly, briefly, accurately and convincingly.

Lipatova (2001) considers the advertising text to be a contamination of different styles, genres and varieties of speech (oral and written, dialogical and monological, colloquial, scientific, etc.), as well as different ways of argumentation (emotional and rational, associative and logical, figurative and subject, etc.).

Other researchers also note the stylistic "hybridity" of advertising messages, namely the involvement in the sphere of mass communication of scientific, popular-scientific, colloquial texts and their performance of new advertising functions (eg., financial reporting documents used in the bank advertisement; letters with the private content from firms to customers that are published in the newspaper for intimating the image of the company, etc. (Kaftandzhiev, 1995).

In turn, Kara-Murza (2003) argues that, "The nature of the advertisement functioning in the current mass communication already allows us to draw conclusions about the existing functional and stylistic features of its texts against the background of other stylistic varieties of the language" (para. 3).

However, the question of the style status of the advertising text remains controversial, since both of the main functions (information, evaluation, impact and persuasion), and the purpose (prompting the mass addressee to a certain action), and social significance (including the field of economics) indicate the proximity of advertisement to the journalistic style, despite all its specificity. Strict financial conditions as one of the extralinguistic factors of advertisement dictate the maximum compression of the advertising text special density of its content, part of which is either not verbalised or symbolised.

In this regard, the advertising text includes the verbal part and non-verbal components: 1) visual-graphic (font, colour, visual elements, spatial-compositional solution); 2) kinaesthetic (gesture, posture, facial expressions); 3) auditory (intonation, rhythm, and other prosodic means of sound design) (Mokshancev, 2009).

All this determines the special structure of the advertising text. For the most part, it cannot be understood as a linear sequence of signs: each type of advertisement tends to complicate the text structure by intertwining semantic components, building a special hierarchy of meanings, modelling text levels. The effect of superposition of different sign systems leads to complex combinatorics of advertising message meanings.

Stylistic analysis shows how the text correlates with non-text (common language, "Code", etc.) subsystems of language –- styles. Text, in general, being speech act, oral or written, from this point of view, appears as a result of the speaker's choice of language forms from the pre-given linguistic capabilities –- phonetic, grammatical, lexical (words), syntactic, and as a combination of them in the speech act, depending on its purpose (function).

The basis of this interpretation was the concept of "communicative" or "functional" style of speech. Syntactic analysis, which is a transformational method, is based on the derivation of complex syntactic structures from simpler ones using a small set of transformation rules.

A unique feature of the style of the advertising text on the background of traditional texts of book-written type — their kind of agrammatism (Bazhenova, 2014), i.e., «A violation of the mandatory logical and grammatical relations between words within the sentence and at the junction of two independent sentences. Advertising text can consist not only of the whole sentences, but also of words and phrases not related to the proposal. The sentences standing together can be typed in different fonts, which establishes an additional semantic relationship between them; because of this, one sentence can be divided into parts. The advertising text often uses a font that does not differentiate lowercase and uppercase letters. Spaces between words and sentences can be arbitrary, and lines can be aligned not only to the left, but also to the right, as well as to the centre. The variety of advertising ideas is extremely large and almost impossible to account for or classify.

All language means used in the advertising text are dominated by the purpose of influencing the addressee, encouraging them to commit an action desirable for the advertising producer. This is ensured by the observance of certain stylistic principles that ensure the expressiveness of the advertising text: dialogism, creating intimacy, increased tension of presentation, etc. (Golub, 2010).

The language means of the advertising text have a stylistic diversity — the focus switches from office-business or scientific style to open conversational, from high poetics to jargon and vernacular, which is explained, on the one hand, with the specifics of the advertised subject, on the other — the orientation of the advertising message to a certain consumer audience.

The pragmatic effect created by associative-emotional words is based primarily on their ability to indirectly appeal to a variety of emotions and feelings of the addressee, as well as to enhance the emotional and psychological impact on the recipient.

Associative-emotional words are a kind of folded statements, largely predetermining not only the stylistic feature of an advertising text, its pragmatic significance, but also determining its positive or negative colour. The difference in the understanding of the advertising text occurs at the pragmatic level and is a consequence of the violation of pragmatic, pragmatic and sociopragmatic norms and rules of language functioning.

The impact of the advertising text on the reader showed that the intention is a pragmastilistic core of the text. It has its own means of expression in its information structure, for example, in the compositional structure, in modality, including evaluative-expressive vocabulary (Vorozhcova, Lykova, & Pushina, 2000).

Pragmatic orientation of advertising texts allows us to set a goal in speech communication –- to convey a message -– in a number of other real goals, in which the transmission of a speech message is some intermediate goal, subordinated, to another, the ultimate goal.

The provision of the implementation in one text of a set of language characteristics of different functional styles raises the question — how the functions of different styles are combined within one text and whether such text can be effective in implementing its communicative setting.

Stilliferovskij (1988) believes that in this case, it is possible to talk not about diverse text, but the text in which there is a relatively large number of elements of a particular style or other styles, but which exist within the framework of a certain functional style, and the use of out-of-the-style funds is governed by the function of this style. If the number of out-of-the-style elements exceeds a certain limit (establishing these limits is the challenge for further research), and their use is not subject to the function-style adapter, this text can be considered a style-less.

Findings

An important result of this work appeared to be identifying the main features and expressive means of advertising texts that influence the process of pragmastylistic advertising adaptation.

Having reworked the voluminous theoretical material and analysed a large body of examples, we can conclude that there are no absolutely accurate algorithms for constructing an advertising text that would be digestible for the most effective impact for any target audience.

But on the basis of recycled material, we can define pragmastylistics.

Pragmastylistics is the interdisciplinary field that studies the communicative effectiveness of the text interpretation subject to language variation stylistic tools at five levels of text structure: phonetic, morphological, lexical-phraseological, syntactical and graphical (Maksimenko, 2005).

Conclusion

Summing up our study, we note that the study of pragmastylistic in advertisement is one of the important, interesting and actual problems of linguistics and linguoculturology. This study can be seen as the basis for the larger studies:

1) in the study of other forms of advertising language;

2) in the study of multilevel linguistic characteristics of advertising texts in a comparative aspect with the use of disciplines related to linguistics.

5) in the study of text tectonics method of distribution of morphological and syntactic, as well as lexical and grammatical categories.

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