AUTHOR’S TRANSFORMATIONS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ADVERTISING DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article deals with functional, pragmatic and language peculiarities of the English-language advertising discourse, in which different forms of language and various linguistic, visual, audio techniques are employed to appeal to potential buyers in order to promote certain products and services. In our everyday lives we meet advertising in many forms – from printed media, television commercials, billboards, Internet. Advertising serves many functions (informative, social, ideological, economic, educational, manipulative). But its main function is promotional: to draw our attention and keep in our minds the availability and desirability of a product, service or brand, to motivate us to choose it. In order to achieve this aim and to get the predetermined response advertising texts must be attractive and memorable. Phraseological units belong to those powerful language means which increase their pragmatic potential. Phraseological units are stable word-groups characterized by a completely or partially transferred idiomatic meaning, inability of syntactic expansion and variation of constituents, restricted scope of grammatical forms of components. Classifications of phraseological units are based on different principles: semantic, structural, functional, etymological, thematic, stylistic.

Phraseological units of all types are used in advertising texts. They have nominative, cognitive, communicative functions. From the point of view of pragmatic potential of phraseological units stylistic, directive, accumulative, evaluative functions are distinguished. Stylistic function conveys the connotative aspect of the advertising utterance. Accumulative function reveals the empirical information summarized in one short phrase. Directive function aims the potential buyer at making the right decision to buy the advertised product. Evaluative function expresses the subjective attitude of the author towards the product advertised in the campaign. According to the degree of preservation of the form and meaning of phraseological units they are divided into pure and transformed idioms, the latter are subdivided into paraphrase and interpreted phraseological unit. Pure phraseological unit in the advertising text is the unit which didn’t undergo any formal or semantic modifications. Paraphrase is an idiom the constituent of which was modified or another lexical unit was substituted for it. Interpreted idiom is a phraseological unit the general meaning of which was changed due to marketing purposes and its semantic and pragmatic planes are modified to suite advertising context.