Cognitive Stylistic Aspect of Semantic Deviations in Slogans

Abstract

This article is devoted to the cognitive stylistic analysis of semantic deviations as foregrounding devices in slogans. The ultimate objective of this article is to reveal and depict stylistic attractors, cognitive processes, structures and mechanisms which determine cognitive stylistic specificity of semantic deviations utilized in slogans. The article sets forth the definition of semantic deviation, expands on what impact stylistic devices falling into the category of semantic deviations make on a reader from cognitive perspective. It also displays how rules and literary norms are violated so as to foreground information, encode implicit information, defamiliarize a media text and capture a potential customer’s attention in slogans. The semantic deviations were analyzed from cognitive and stylistic perspective in slogans of companies with a household name. Furthermore, conceptual metaphor analysis and cognitive-stylistic analysis were applied to analyze how semantic deviations are deployed in the text. Having conducted the research, the following findings were revealed: By means of leveraging bodily and sensory-motor experience and displaying tangible and nonhuman items as something animate metaphorical utterances allow a potential end user to envision and get a profound insight into what is being represented by the advertiser. Regarding simile, it incorporates conceptual mapping between two incompatible concepts by juxtaposing two tangible objects. Direct and specific comparison of two entities facilitates the decipherment of the message behind the stylistic device and evokes the mental images. When it comes to pun, by virtue of dual meaning pun calls forth the potential customer’s brainwork and pushes him/her to interpret the hidden meaning. By means of pun the slogan grabs a potential user’s attention and exerts a humorous effect on him/her. As for paradox, this stylistic device activates a potential end user’s cognitive processing and encyclopedic knowledge structures as well as calls for unraveling the parallel between and make sense of two abnormal and contradictory terms to decode the creative and novel meaning behind the hidden message where pun was integrated.