SYNTACTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVERTISING DISCOURSE


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Abstract

The article highlights three key syntactic characteristics of advertising discourse, analyzed on the basis of English-language advertising texts of non-specific thematic affiliation: the predominance of a certain type of sentences, commitment towards syntactic compression and a specific composition of arguments, as well as the inherent use of syntactic rhetorical techniques. The specifics of the syntactic design of advertising texts is studied using structural, stylistic and pragmatic methods of analysis with the aim of describing the compositional syntactic construction of advertising messages and characterizing the corresponding peculiarities of the way advertising information is being perceived by a potential consumer. The findings of the study summarize the set of syntactic characteristics of advertising text design: 1) the success of the advertising discourse depends not only on the correct selection of words, but also on the syntactic organization of the advertising text; 2) although all types of sentences are present in the English-language advertising discourse, imperative sentences are the most common and pragmatically effective; 3) an advertising message is better perceived and memorized when it is constructed as a short text subject to syntactic compression; 4) advertising text efficiency depends on the positioning of the arguments in its syntactic structure, and the most effective model is where the key argument is located in the heading, the evidence argument is placed in the main text, and the generalizing argument is exposed in the echo phrase; 5) syntactic rhetorical tropes are an important advertising tool, since they are more memorable and can attract the attention of a potential consumer, adding an element of surprise and creating a more positive attitude towards the product as a whole; 6) English advertising texts typically contain such syntactic tropes as ellipsis, parallel constructions, inversion, parcellation, antimetabole, and rhetorical questions.

About the authors

E. N. Malyuga

academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, head of the Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Economics, RUDN University

Author for correspondence.
Email: morenov@ssau.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6935-0661

Doctor of Linguistics, professor

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