Linguoculturological aspects of the contextual use of phraseological units in advertising slogans

Abstract

The paper aims at a comparative analysis of aspects of usual and occasional use of phraseological units (PUs) in the context of social and commercial slogans for products, services and feature-length films in Russian, English and German in order to identify the main trends in the contextual implementation of PUs by reference to a linguoculturological approach. The practical material for the analysis was 18 thousand slogans in Russian, English and German. Description of the analyzed material is presented in the form of a table, where contextual configurations are arranged vertically and languages at issue are placed horizontally. The quantitative analysis of the material under study based on comparison is carried out in the vertical (all the cases of contextual use of PUs are considered within one language) and horizontal (each contextual configuration is considered separately in three languages) sections. Phraseology is a special area of linguistics within which language, culture, history and world view of a particular ethnic group are most closely intertwined. Phraseological units being conductors into a particular culture often function in the language of advertising, which implies the use of usual and occasional phraseological units as verbal means of recipients' attraction. The comparative nature of the research which covers the analysis of slogans in three languages and a multifaceted approach to the analysis of the practical material under study determine the relevance of the study. As a result of the carried out research the author came to a conclusion that there is an active process of transformation of PUs in the language of advertising in comparison with the language of fiction literature. The analysis of the practical material under study has shown that the choice in favor of a particular stylistic device is determined not only by the pragmatics of an advertising campaign, but also by cultural information, structure of language and mentality fixed in PUs. Imagery embedded in PUs stipulates for the uniqueness of the nation-specific picture of the world and thinking of native language speakers which, in turn, are also reflected in the advertising text. Intense interest towards the use of stylistic patterns of pun and extended phraseological metaphor in English can be explained by the centuries-old tradition of the English-speaking population to creatively play upon the language and words, which is noted by many researchers. The German-language taglines illustrate the frequency of the usage of ellipsis, which reflects a common tendency of the German language towards the realization of linguistic economy and corresponding reduction. Permutation is widely used in the Russian-language taglines due to the syntactic peculiarities of the Russian language, its relatively free word order and, consequently, the ability to vary the position of the constituents within the sentence.