Metalanguage reflection in modern advertising, or when metatext is more important than text

Abstract

The article considers the advertising language as a specific linguistic phenomenon, the main characteristics of which are creativity, interactivity, expressiveness, culturogenicity, intertextuality and polycode. These characteristics of the advertising language, which determine its uniqueness, were the result of the influence of external and internal factors. An external factor is the pragmatic nature of advertising, which manifests itself in its suggestive orientation. The internal factor determining the uniqueness of the advertising language is the orientation of the producer to the code. The advertiser consciously and carefully selects the method of encoding the message, so the creation of the advertising text takes place in the process of deep metalanguage reflection: creolized texts of modern advertising are permeated with metalanguage contexts. The analysis of the corpus of examples of modern advertising texts, taking into account the assumptions put forward, allows us to conclude that a high concentration of meta-texts is one of the main defining features of advertising discourse. The objectives of this article are to identify and manifest the key characteristics of the advertising language; to resolve the question of how legitimate the very fact of distinguishing the "advertising language" as a specific linguistic construct can be considered; to determine the key parameter that forms the "superstructure" of the advertising language over the basis of natural language. The key characteristics of the advertising language are determined by the communicative orientation of advertising texts. The latter is purely pragmatic in nature. The main purpose of the advertising text is to have an effective impact on the recipient. Moreover, this effect is characterized as indirect, having a manipulative nature. The suggestiveness of advertising is perceived as its immanent property and basic category. At the center of the study of the language of modern advertising is the problem of the correlation of text and metatext. Metalanguage reflection plays a great role in the creation of advertising texts. Creolized texts of modern advertising are permeated with metalanguage contexts. A high concentration of meta-texts is one of the main features of discourse. For the advertising discourse, this feature is decisive.