ANOMALIES IN AN ADVERTISING TEXT (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE)

Abstract

This article is devoted to anomalies, i.e. non-standard ways of using vocabulary in advertising texts, by means of which the communication is carried out. The interest in the study of the mechanisms of speech impact made this study relevant. The novelty of this study lies in insufficient research on anomalies in the language of advertising. The hypothesis of this study was the assumption that speech anomalies could be used in advertising texts, since they had been previously studied in fiction and article writing. The aim of the article is to demonstrate examples of non-standard, occasional use of the English language means in the texts of commercial advertising. In order to achieve it the following tasks were set: to describe the principles according to which a word, phrase or other formation can be considered anomalous; to find examples and systematize the types of anomalies used by copywriters in English-language advertising texts. Materials and methods. The material for the study involved the texts selected by random sampling from printed periodicals and online stores. To prove the logical or illogical use of words, we applied the analysis of semantic meaning, i.e. decomposition of meaning into components, as well as morphological analysis of word forms. These methods involve the use of English-English thesauri. At the sentence level, syntactic analysis was used. Results. The analysis showed that the examples of anomalous use of the vocabulary can be reduced to three groups: lexical-semantic, morphological and syntactic. As a result, we managed to show that the most numerous group is the first one, which includes examples of illogical combinations on the principle of animate-inanimate, incorrect designation of quality, concrete-abstract, violations of stylistic combination of words, as well as deformation of phraseological units. The second group is represented by morphological violations of word-formation patterns, simple conjunction of bases, changes in spelling. The third group – syntactic anomalies – is represented by examples of violations in cohesion and split infinitive. Practical implications. The results can be used by copywriters, marketers, who compose advertising texts not only in English, but also in Russian.

Keywords

• language norm
• language and speech anomalies
• advertising text
• advertising language
• advertising communication