The Use of Pragmatically Motivated Phraseological Units in Print Advertisements

The Use of Pragmatically Motivated Phraseological Units in Print Advertisements

DZANIC, Mirza

Key words: pragmatics, print ad, culture ABSTRACT The advertising itself is said to be a sort of persuasive discourse. Namely, it is ‘‘to a large extent a discourse of highly meaningful word-puns, hard-hitting slogans or other textual devices characteristic of a maximum economy of expression’’ (Cap 2002: 41). According to Angela Goddard (2005: 71), ‘‘advertisers often rely on the fact that readers approach texts in an active way, being prepared to work to decode messages’’. Therefore, the message ought to be colorful and memorable. One of the main features of advertising is the abundance of phraseological units that should be familiar to the majority of readers within a chosen target group. To put it simply, the wording of an advertisement must fulfill the basic aim: to become an effective tool which will make a potential customer pursue an action i.e. buy a product or at least to ‘‘develop some kind of favorable mental state towards an action i.e. admit possibility of buying a product at a later date’’ (Cap 2002: 42). The paper deals with the discourse of print advertising, focusing on the stylistic potential of phraseological unit as a lexicalized bilexemic or polylexemic word group, which has relative syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiomatized, may carry connotations and may have an emphatic function in a text.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1899