Языковые технологии «антивирусной» социальной рекламы: от «Испанского гриппа» до “Covid-19”

Abstract

The paper examines the degree of linguistic creativity in public service advertising (PSA) in the case study of “antiviral” campaigns. The article specifies three main groups of PSA texts that promote the fight against viruses throughout the 20th -21st centuries: 1) advertising of the 1910s – 20s about the prevention of the Spanish flu widespread in Europe, Russia and the USA; 2) the Avant-garde hygiene propaganda in the USSR in the 1920s, and 3) contemporary PSA on COVID-1. PSA of the early 20th century used mostly directive speech acts and imperative forms. In the texts of Soviet Avant-garde advertisement for hygiene, the use of neologisms and polysemy leads to an increase in the degree of linguistic creativity and the illocutionary effect of the message. The most common feature of the Year-2020 texts is the development of the semantic structure of words. The use of semantic structure as a way of language manipulation in contemporary antiviral advertising means a limited degree of “discursive creativity”, that is different from “linguistic creativity”. The paper distinguishes the main cognitive mechanisms of “antiviral” PSA: refocusing, or focus shifting, and zooming in, which encompass the lexical-semantic structure, including augmentative forms, concretization of meaning, enantiosemy (auto-antonym), and non-usual application of causative and non-causative verbs in the same context. The paper highlights the creation of special “virus words” (by analogy with “filler words”) in contemporary public service advertising that form slogans and mark the message as belonging to an “antiviral” campaign related to a “viral” discourse.