Language Means to Express the Communicative Tactic of “Focusing on Purchaser’s Needs” in Advertising Discourse.

Abstract

The relevance of the study lies in the increased interest in researching advertisements, as well as its manipulative features. The study of the communicative aspects of advertising attracted the attention of many linguists (N. Janich, G. Cook, G. Myers, H. Kaftanjiev etc.). However, not all aspects of this issue are sufficiently covered in the scientific literature. Despite the popularity of this topic, there is still no clear division of communicative strategies and tactics used to implement advertising discourse, as well as sufficient study of lexical, syntactic and stylistic means significant to each of these tactics in scientific papers.

The purpose of the article is to identify the structural and communicative peculiarities of the texts of automobile advertising in the German and English languages.

Specific of researched subject provides the using of: contextual-interpretative and pragmatic text analysis to point out motives and goals of the advertising texts’ author, as well as to evaluate the efficiency of the chosen communicative tactic’s influence on a recipient; content-analysis to determine the frequency of using of certain language means.

During the conducted research the following structural and communicative features were found: 1) the strategy of manipulation in the automobile advertisements using the tactic of “focusing on purchaser’s needs” is realized mainly on the lexical level; 2) lexical means are the most important, as they emphasize the positive image of the car, its high status and uniqueness, satisfying recipient’s needs for respect and self-esteem; 3) syntactic and stylistic means play a secondary role: syntactic means, focusing on a certain section of the text, draw attention of the recipient to certain lexical means; stylistic means serve for better memorizing of an advertising text.

The methods of the study may be used in studying of the structural and communicative peculiarities of other communicative tactics and strategies, as well as in comparative analysis of the advertising discourse in the German, English and other languages.