The functions of metonymy as a genre-forming mean

Abstract

Metonymy as the instrument of language and mechanism of conceptualization is one of the fundamental questions in scientific literature. Besides that, advertising is a rapidly growing sphere of activity and communication. For this reason, linguistic, marketing and cognitive characteristics of advertising become another area of modern researches. However, few academics have addressed the issue of the role of metonymy in the creation of advertising text. The main purpose of this article is to study the functions of metonymy in advertising slogans. Metonymy is not just a trope in slogan as many authors state. We make the hypothesis that it is also one of the key instruments in advertising communication, especially in slogan. 1000 slogans have been analyzed and the following methods have been employed: statistical, descriptive and contextual. We adopt the cognitive interpretation of metonymy and its classification into frame, propositional and script metonymy by N.A. Ilyukhina. We examine the most productive models in slogan: the characteristic of goods onto goods under frame metonymy and models of script metonymy. The organization of information about advertising denotatum (goods, service, consumer or producer) determines the peculiarities of metonymic functions. The following functions of metonymy in slogan: the function of economy, of imagery and expression, accenting, evaluative, euphemistic, manipulative ones are described by the author. The findings of research illustrate that the economy and accentuation are main functions of metonymy for this genre of advertising text. Due to these functions metonymy ensure the most important qualities of slogan, such as brevity, conceptuality and imagery. We conclude that metonymy is one of the most important genre-forming means and in slogan it realizes its key characteristics as cognitive and language phenomenon.

Keywords

• advertising language
• advertising slogan
• metonymic transfer
• functional analysis
• frame metonymy
• script metonymy
• marketing information.