Expressive Syntactic Devices as Means of Forming Advertising Discourse

Abstract

Advertising, as no other professional discourse type, presupposes extensive use of expressive linguistic means specially designed for producing emotional effects on the addressee. This research proceeds the premise that the language expressive function, as the ability to reflect human emotions, subjective perception and attitude to the denoted issues, is actualised not only in lexical, but also in speech structural forms. Hence, the purpose of the article is to sort out and analyse the expressive potential of syntactic means in building up advertising texts, since it focuses on rhetorical influence on the recipient, which attributes discursive features to advertisements. Texts of different volumes are taken to exemplify the significance of expressive syntax in advertising, and direct correlation between text sizes and syntactic expressive means saturation is revealed with methods of functional linguistics and quantitative analysis. The corpus of syntactic devices under analysis includes various structural sentences types, parentheses, syntactic parallelism and repetitions, parcelling and other constructions. The authors conclude that the specific advertising discourse feature lies in the possibility for expressive syntactic means to grow into stylistic and pragmatic devices.