EXPANSION AS A MEANS OF STRENGTHENING APPELLATIVENESS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNIT IN ADVERTISING

Abstract

The purpose of the scientific reconnaissance is the investigation of the influence of the most commonly used but yet insufficiently studied type of phraseological units modification – expansion – on the functioning of phraseological units in an advertising text. Its tasks are to identify the characteristic features of wordsexpanders, their influence on the semantics of transformed expressions and on the change of their quantitative and qualitative characteristics as compared to the original ones. The tasks fulfillment and the goal achievement became possible owing to the use of the methods relevant for this study: phraseological identification, phraseological description, adequate description of lexicographic type as a sort of component analysis and contextual analysis. This study is based on sampling from advertising texts of popular German-language magazines which contains 75 modified phraseological units including expressions with complicated, but not reinterpreted meaning. The results of the analysis of this material show that phraseological units of advertising text are most commonly expanded by means of adjectives and adverbs. Being in close correlation with the noun of phraseological unit, the expanders-definitions also become its integral part and direct a reader’s attention to the important features of advertised subject. The same function is characteristic of the words-expanders forming attributive compound words with a noun of phraseological unit. The modifiers mentioned above have different influence on denotative and connotative peculiarities of phraseological unit. Unlike expander-definitions, expanders-adverbials are syntactically connected not with one of the components of phraseological unit, but with this unit as an integral whole and thus belong to the nearest surrounding of phraseological unit and not to its composition. The level of emotiveness and expressiveness of modification depends on the characteristics of expander. The number of adverbs-expanders is considerably less as compared to adjectives, they have close syntactic connection with phraseological unit or one of its constituent parts, and most commonly specify or modify its connotative features. Advertisement creators reach the brightest transformations by means of expanding proverbs and adding unexpected continuation to the expressions which are familiar to each representative of linguistic community. The review of the investigated phraseological units in quantitative and qualitative aspects demonstrates, on the one hand, an increase of the number of connotative multipliers in the marginal majority of modifications, which is an indicator of meaning narrowing, and on the other hand, the positive meaning of the most of these multipliers which make a pleasant impression on a recipient, which is an indicator of meaning improvement. Conclusions. The analysis indicates that the expansion of phraseological units changes in a definite way the denotative and connotative characteristics of phraseological units in advertising and significantly enhances the impact on a recipient.