BRANDING AS A LINGUOCULTURAL PHENOMENON: A PRAGMATIC AND SEMANTIC ASPECT

Abstract

The article touches upon the analysis of the pragmаtic and semantic aspect that is entwined into the phenomenon of branding. The phenomenon of branding reflects a significant cultural layer of the modern consumer society. The essence of the brand is central to understanding the concept of the brand itself. It is a representation of semantic and pragmatic characteristics that merge into a single pragmatic-semantic unit. To reveal the presuppositions inherent in the essence of the brand, it is necessary to be able to “understand” the target audience and recognize an individual as a representative of this target audience with their interests and needs. Understanding the essence of the brand and decoding the presuppositions embedded in it is impossible without correct perception of the pragmatic-semantic aspects of the entire semiotic situation, within which the brand functions as a linguocultural phenomenon. That means that the concept of a brand in the article is considered not only as a marketing concept when promoting commercial products, but is understood more broadly as a linguocultural phenomenon, whose pragmatics is formed by merging key semantic layers – syntactics, semantics, semiotics – into it in the context of the modern linguocultural situation. The semantics of the brand and its decoding through the disclosure of the linguo-semiotic aspects integrated into the brand name during its formation largely depend on the pragmatic potential, which sends the participants of the communication directly to the context of speech use. Thus, we can say that the formation of the brand’s message is based on two aspects engaged in forming the semantic load - linguistic and paralinguistic, implemented through the pragmatics of the brand, whose formation, in turn, takes place at the above mentioned three semantic levels.

Keywords

• advertising language
• brand
• brand name
• linguopragmatics
• linguosemiotics
• pragmassemantics