Productive Manipulation as an Element of University Advertising Discourse: Pragma-Axiological Analysis

Abstract

The article is devoted to the pragma-axiological and partial psycholinguistic analysis of advertising videos of US universities in order to identify the productive manipulative potential of modern advertising university discourse. The relevance of the study is due to both extralinguistically — the great demand for quality education in the modern world, and linguistically — by the study of the processes of productive speech manipulation as one of the fundamental components of quality communication. The novelty of the research is seen in a qualitatively new pragma-axiological approach to the study of discourse and the value component of the suggestive influence exerted by this discourse. The author’s method of conducting pragma-axiological and partial psycholinguistic analysis, used to identify the pragma-axiological charge of the discursive space and its manipulative potential is presented in the article. Particular attention is paid to the interdependence of the addressee’s value-evaluative attitudes, the lexical units-verbalizers of these attitudes, their pragma-axiological charge and the suggestive (productive manipulative) impact provided. The results of the frequency analysis of part-of-speech indicators and the coefficients of discourse emotivity that depend on them are presented. The results, gained in the framework of the pragma-axiological analysis, are confirmed by the coefficients of the emotiveness of the discourse under study, obtained in the course of a partial psycholinguistic analysis. The key axiological components of productive speech manipulation in the modern advertising university discourse of US universities are presented.

Keywords

• discourse
• manipulation
• productive manipulation
• pragmatics
• axiology
• coefficient of emotiveness
• axiosphere
• concept