This dissertation focuses on revealing linguistic and cognitive characteristics of concept CHILDREN, communicative and pragmatic characteristics of marketing discourse of American children's clothing companies. The specifics of the polydiscursive concept CHILDREN and the open marketing discourse determined the necessity of applying an integrative approach to the study of the concept and discourse under analysis in the frameworks of cognitive and pragmatic paradigm. Within the context of this research, marketing discourse of American children's clothing companies is defined as cognitive and communicative activity, restricted by the institutional boundaries of American children's clothing companies, aimed at the realization of discourse participants' status and role capabilities and the achievement of social, business and marketing aims. It is proved that multimodality, interaction, dynamism, consistency, detail, creativity, and didacticism are the characteristic features of the analyzed discourse. Creolized texts located on the products of the companies are considered to be the key elements in the realization of concept CHILDREN in marketing discourse of American children's clothing companies and the main channel of communication between the sender and the recipient. Slogans, images, engravings on the products are viewed as creolized texts in which the verbal and non-verbal components create a single visual, structural, semantic, and functional whole that ensures complex pragmatic influence on the recipient. Creolized texts in the analyzed discourse consist of the main and supplementary verbal component as well as the main and supplementary nonverbal component; together they form a creolized text which is informative for the adults and attractive for the children. Cognitive and discursive analysis made it possible to determine that the polydiscursive concept CHILDREN is the central concept in the open marketing discourse of American children's clothing companies. The structure of the analyzed concept consists of the logical and notional as well as the figurative and associative layers. The core of the logical and notional layer encompasses such features as age and gender. It is suggested that kinship and inherent properties are part of the periphery. The figurative and associative layer is structured by the domains Family, Play, Sport which enable the comprehension of concept CHILDREN. The slots of these domains are filled with nominative units which identify children as family members, object of love and pride (domain Family), superheroes, fairy-tale characters (domain Play), experienced sportsmen, team players, leaders (domain Sport). Such attributive characteristics as features of appearance, traits of character, age, gender, attitude to children, which are expressed by adjectives, contribute to a more detailed presentation of children. Semantic analysis of the means of verbalization of each conceptual layer indicated that they are used to represent the variety of children's characters, types of their behavior, the interaction between the children themselves and with the surrounding world. The reconstruction and interpretation of the metaphors in the texts of marketing discourse of American children's clothing companies revealed metaphors of a new type - verbal-pictorial metaphors, in which the source domain is portrayed non-verbally and the target domain has a verbal representation. The presence of both adult and child recipients in the analyzed discourse has proved the necessity of appealing to the emotions, memories, and feeling of both age categories when creating verbal pictorial images. Descriptive and instructional (advisory), emotional and situational, animation metaphors have been singled out in the marketing discourse of American children's clothing companies. The communicative-pragmatic approach revealed that the discursive personality (children's clothing company) puts into practice a broad range of internal and external communicative strategies and tactics that vary depending on the representatives of the discursive surrounding, aims and channels of communication in order to achieve the aim of marketing and implement the marketing strategies and tactics of the company. The internal communicative strategies correlate with the strategies of action coordination, the external strategies of non-financial incentives - with the strategies of information provision, and the strategies of financial incentives - with the strategies of competitiveness assurance. Such values of American culture as individualism, independence, patriotism, leadership, teamwork, politeness, self-discipline, concern for environment have been defined in the study and the peculiarities of their verbalization in the analyzed discourse have been determined. The integrative approach employed in the research has led to the conclusion that the linguistic, cognitive, communicative and pragmatic characteristics of the concept CHILDREN structure a new viewpoint on the interaction of the participants of the marketing discourse of American children's clothing companies. Key words: concept, business discourse, official discourse, marketing discourse, creolized text, verbal-pictorial metaphor, discursive personality, communicative strategy, communicative tactic, cultural value.
