Functional-pragmatic potential of speech act variation in advertising discourse

Abstract

Introduction. The dominant illocutionary goal of institutional advertising discourse is to exercise a suggestive (implicit) influence on a wide range of recipients. An urgent task of modern discourse is to determine a basic list of speech act alternations to ensure the perlocutionary effect necessary for the producer. Identifying their functional and pragmatic potential will make it possible to develop specific recommendations for achieving the initial operational goals of advertising.Materials and Methods. The main techniques of discourse-modus analysis allow analyzing the correlation of the formal explication of the addressee’s voluntary space and, based on consideration of conventionalization markers as the focal mechanism for promoting the author’s intentions into the general space of relevance, to form a list of the most effective descriptive speech acts.Analysis. There is a shortage of adequate terminological tools that allow precise nomination of the type and kind of speech act alternation in systemic analysis of the functional pragmatics of variable speech acts in advertising communication. Based on the contamination of various criteria features, the author’s classification was created, taking into account the illocutionary-semantic correlations of the utterance as a whole, the type and strength of the illocutionary function, the recipient’s focus and the initial prediction of the stimulus-reactive action in objective reality.Results. Meta-realization of the illocutionary goal in advertising communication is carried out within the framework of verbal conventionalization based on the use of commissives, expositives, and permissives; with verbal representation in the phatic-regulatory aspect through satisfactives, regulatives; in the process of discursive dialogization with the help of requests, invitives, injunctives, instructions and suggestions; in discursive reflection in narratives, argumentatives, descriptives and constatives. Direct instructions, instructions and suggestions, which demonstrate low frequency in institutional advertising discourse, have the greatest potential for message performatization. The degree of suggestive influence corresponding to the dominant illocutionary goal demonstrates an inverse relationship with the intensity and frequency of speech act alternations in the text.

Keywords

• advertising discourse
• speech act variability
• suggestive influence
• functional pragmatics
• illocutionary-perlocutionary correspondence
• discourse-modus analysis