Machulska K. Linguopragmatics of Commercial Slogans in English-language Advertising Internet Discourse

This dissertation focuses on the complex research of lingual and pragmatic features of commercial slogans in English-language advertising Internet discourse. Theoretical and critical aspects of English-language advertising Internet discourse is presented from the view of pragmatics. The source base of the research is an online store – a website, where it's possible to choose, order and buy the proper goods or services. The research object is a slogan of the English-language online store. Analysis methodologies of the commercial slogan's verbal components have been developed. Linguopragmatic approach is a key method of research. The basic lingual features of the advertising slogan's components at the lexical, semantic, syntactic levels, their stylistic features were characterized and their correlations with communicative strategies and tactics were established. Syntax analysis suggested that the requirements for conciseness and minimization of the advertising text content cause a short form of slogans; thus the average advertising slogan has 4.46 lexemes. Advertising slogans mostly have a form of a substantive phrase (41%) and simple personal sentence (37%). A significant role in expressing the pragmatic content of slogans belongs to the stylistic means. The most productive and commonly used are metaphors, epithets, lexical and phonetic repetitions. The functional parameters of the English-language advertising slogan's components were described. With the help of functional-onomasiological analysis elements, slogans' verbal units have been united into five functional-onomasiological groups that correlate with the needs of consumers of goods and services. There was Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs adapted. Concerning the pragmatic aspect, the communicative strategies and tactics of the slogans of the English-language online-stores were determined. Among them are: 1)strategy of encouraging the consumer to choose the appropriate good or service; 2)strategy of positioning the organization in the market. Also various communicative tactics, with the help of which those two strategies can be realized, have been described. They are: tactic of appeal to the consumer; tactic of target group indication; tactic of ambiguity/disambiguity of the content; tactic of demonstration of the organization's advantages; tactic of emphasizing of competence, experience, traditions and values; tactic of goods and services naming; tactic of using the store's name. The most important communicative parameter of an advertising slogan is its pragmatic potential, which is understood as the functional capacity of the slogan to achieve the desired perlocutionary effect on the addressee by means of multilevel verbal and non-verbal means. It is a real or probable ability to make a meaningful impact on a potential audience. Traditionally, pragmatic potential has been studied as a category characterized by qualitative characteristics, most often determined only by expert judgment. It is proposed to quantify the pragmatic potential of the advertising slogan with quantitative methods, using a carefully organized survey (a linguistic interviewing) of the respondents – the consumers of goods and services. The author’s method of linguistic interviewing was developed and with the aim of identifying the advertising slogan's pragmatic potential the sociolinguistic experiment with English native speakers was conducted. The peculiarities of respondents' preferences regarding advertising slogans with different communicative strategies and tactics were analyzed depending on the age, gender of the respondents and their proposed social role (potential owner or potential customer of the online-store). The experiment found that the greatest pragmatic potential is inherent in those slogans which represent the tactics of naming products or services that implement a communicative strategy of positioning an online store on the market if they are formulated as a substantive phrase or simple sentence; the stylistically neutral nouns-appellatives have main content in such slogans.