Libmonster ID: SE-592
Author(s) of the publication: I. A. MAGERRAMOV

The speech freedom of recent years in our country, which has revealed many unexpected dead ends and nooks on the path of language development, nevertheless once again confirmed the inviolability of the thesis "rhetoric is a child of democracy". Oddly enough, with the general decline (due to various circumstances) in the cultural and speech level of different people, the possibilities for creating and using texts of various orientations and structures, primarily texts of a small genre that correspond to the dynamic rhythm of modern life, have significantly expanded: jokes, jokes, puns, jokes, paradoxes, aphorisms.

The abundance of genres of such texts indicates the universality of one of the leading features of the Russian national character that they contain - humor, irony, self-criticism, ridiculing everything and everything. There is a feeling that modern man defends himself from most of the problems that have befallen him with the help of irony. He gets even more satisfaction, apparently, when he succeeds in successfully veiling the true meaning of a statement, so that the latter becomes a mystery to others, or when he manages to get to the essence of a similar statement of another. At the same time, the role of a broad context that allows you to detail the real and potential semantic shades of what is said increases enormously. As O. A. Kornilov writes in the book " Linguistic Worldviews as derivatives of National mentalities "(Moscow, 1999), "the true meaning of what is said is often formed from misunderstandings, metaphors, connotations, i.e. it is based on the entire cognitive base of a person who knows the Russian language worldview. Very often, for an adequate perception of a Russian text, one must be a "person with a concept"" (p. 90).

These features could not but affect one of the specific areas of today's language reality - advertising. Eu-

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if we leave aside the advertising products of previous decades, which were placed in narrowly professional, industry publications, then we can say that today's advertising is, in fact, a new area of our reality, the linguistic and psychological aspects of which are still being realized and studied. It is no accident that advertising in the West (and now, probably, in our country as well) is compared to art and religion in terms of its impact on mass consciousness (see about this).: Dobrosklonskaya T. G. Opyt izucheniya media-tekstov [The experience of studying media texts]. Moscow, 2000, pp. 158-160]. In addition, in terms of the breadth and depth of penetration into various spheres of life, in terms of the instructive role that it plays for modern man, it is also compared with myths that had a similar mechanism of influence on man in primitive society.

Today's advertising text, regardless of what media it is implemented in, being a complex structural and semantic formation both from the point of view of generation and perception, in order to increase its effectiveness, is saturated with wordplay, paradoxes, irony, allusions, historical and literary reminiscences - in a word, it becomes a specific genre, it allows you to combine many rhetorical and stylistic techniques, tropes, and figures. On the one hand, this tendency is a manifestation of the ontological qualities of any verbal text: to make full use of the word's capabilities, to fully reveal its semantics, and to show syntactic potencies. On the other hand, there is also an attempt to overcome the "alienness", the rejection of advertising by the body of the same media within which it is placed. With a certain degree of caution, the Bakhtin concept of "someone else's speech", "someone else's word", developed, however, on the basis of literary texts, can be applied to advertising.

The validity of this approach is confirmed by its justification when applied to texts of other directions. From this point of view, all the activities of the advertiser (the creator of the text) are aimed at neutralizing the alienness noted above, often by giving the text special verbal "staples" for better implantation into the "alien" organism, so that the advertising word looks as much like its own as possible. This is closely related to what M. M. Bakhtin wrote: "All words for each person are divided into their own and others', but the boundaries between them can shift, and on these borders there is an intense ideological struggle " (Bakhtin M. M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity, Moscow, 1979, p. 348). The effectiveness of this "ideological" (i.e., linguistic, rhetorical) struggle in the field of advertising depends on the specific methods and techniques that accompany the creation and implementation of the advertising text.

One of these methods is staples, which are apparently used, as already mentioned, to overcome the foreignness factor,

page 60

these are para-advertising messages of the Russian Radio advertising service. Having no semantic connection with the content of advertising, they, in fact, perform only a functional role, preceding or completing the sound of the ad itself. In these para-ads, at the level of generation (author, speaker), a conscious clash of meanings is carried out, which ultimately leads to layering and interweaving of semantic levels. According to G. A. Zolotova, when considering the structure of the text in the collective monograph " Communicative Grammar of the Russian Language "(Moscow, 1998), " the author's tactics also determine the character of the reader's relationship to the text; the measure of activation of his mental and emotional participation depends on the open or intriguing-mysterious connection of events, on transparency or inconsistency, ambiguity, and on the perhaps it depends on the allegorical nature, on the suggestive power and expressive intensity of the text" (pp. 454-455).

As for the witty, shrewd listener, his task, as it seems to us, is to discover all the hidden meanings, "connect the ends with the ends", to discern the semantic core in which these meanings are focused. The more such meanings there are, the more interesting and complex the final result of using para-advertising-witticisms. In the cited work, G. A. Zolotova refers to the Austrian researcher Heinrich Pfandl, a subtle connoisseur and interpreter of V. Vysotsky, who, noting, after R. Barth, the role of an active reader in the perception of a literary text, in one of the poet's couplets finds five or six intertextual associations, or allusive plans, only a complete account of which he takes. It is considered a condition for understanding this text (see: Zolotova G. A. et al. Edict. op. p. 455, footnote). As we can see, modern linguistics successfully applies a similar approach to texts of various contents.

To illustrate this point, consider the following para-ad: "We are neither right nor left, because we are valenki." Contextual and semantic analysis reveals the following meanings (plans)in this utterance::

1) direct (mnimobukvalny): as if on behalf of the boots themselves, which are neither right nor left;

2) metaphorical: valenok is a person who is not good for anything (in other words, a burdock);

3) pun intended (political): rightists, leftists, centrists, etc.;

4) metonymic (related to 3): the deputy is valenok (Hey, valenok!);

5) ironic (author's-pejorative): we are all valenki in the end, such is our fate.

The latter plan may have a different meaning: we are all (the people) centrists (3), and you can't take us with your bare hands (i.e., a conscious position).

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Not all of these planes are equally active; for example, levels (2) and (4) are not explicitly defined and are not represented in the syntactic structure of this utterance.

The same multi-level interpretation is allowed by the para-advertising "It is better to smoke in Honduras than to dry in Kolyma". Here the semantic plans are connected with the meaning of the colloquial verb "kalymit"; with a relatively stable understanding of the country name "Honduras", associated with an unstable seme resulting from the consonance of this word with the words "fool, fool"; with the understanding of the occasional verb "hondursit" as "fooling around, fooling around"; with the presuppositive meaning of the toponym "Kolyma" (as a place of reference); with awareness of the preference for the content of the left part of the statement, expressed by comparative constructions ("it is better to call..."). The meaning of this statement about being in love with another is revealed even better: "The wrong country was called Honduras", where the toponym gets a final negative color in the light of the meaning described above and where the implied meaning is very clearly manifested by associative transfer of the name to another well-known country.

Observations show that the effectiveness of a joke can also depend on the degree of paradoxicity and incongruity of its parts. Many para-ads are built on the paradox model. Since the latter contains and skillfully disguises a logical error, which, unlike sophism, is made unintentionally, the procedure for finding and detecting this error is of a certain rhetorical and linguistic interest. If we take as a basis the logical approach to the text of the paradox, then in most cases the latter is an equation in which the unknown is a semantic shift that leads to the apparent destruction of the identity structure, when the left and right parts seem to cease to be equal to each other. In reality, there is no change in the volume of the content of the parts. In order to solve this equation, i.e. to understand the meaning of the paradox, it is necessary to instantly" see "the unknown contained in it (semantic focus or place of displacement, shift), isolate and add it to the meaning set by the author (or" subtract " from it). Upon successful completion of this mental operation, the correct answer must be obtained, which coincides with the suggested one (i.e. intended) version of the speaker (or writer). Figuratively speaking, the paradox resembles the well-known Mobius strip, in which the twisting of the ends occurred unnoticed by the eye. However, in order to align the tape, it is enough to cut it in any place. A paradox cannot be aligned only in a certain place - where its semantic focus is located. Let's illustrate this with classic examples:

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1) People are mad, and this is such a general rule that not to be mad would also be a kind of madness (B. Pascal).

2) Indeed, many people read only to have the right not to think (G. K. Lichtenberg).

3) You go quieter - you will go further (Russian proverb).

4) Seven nannies have a child without an eye (Russian proverb). By simplifying the schematization of these statements, we obtain the following identities, which contain the core of the paradox.

1) not native = madness.

2) read = (have the right) not to think.

3) almost standing = moving away.

4) fourteen eyes = no eyes.

As we can see, in statement (1), the semantic shift is located on the left side of the equation, which is also an identity in itself (all people are mad, and the one who violates this universal rule is abnormal in its own way). Statement (2) can be interpreted as follows: reading should in fact stimulate "thinking" or give the right to other mental operations, which can include "non-thinking". In statement (3), the direct relationship between distance and speed of movement is violated: the implicit semantic component of the integrity of the subject of movement falls into the positive core of the paradox. As for the last statement, all fourteen eyes have for some reason ceased to perform the function of the organ of vision, as a result of which seven nurses are like blind people.

As it turns out, the whole rhetorical essence of the paradox consists in such a collision of known meanings, in creating a new meaning and in refreshing the old ones. Unlike a trope (metaphor, metonymy), a paradox necessarily needs a context and is revealed in it. Very often it is accompanied by irony, which translates the paradox into the realm of wit. At the same time, there is another level (ironic), which in itself is two-dimensional.

The humorous effect of using such statements is achieved, apparently, when the listener immediately perceives all existing plans. If you are unable to "read" (i.e. isolate and connect) meanings the listener discovers what is characterized as a lack of a sense of humor (in other cases - logical thinking). On the other hand, these mental operations are mostly unconscious in nature, and the desire to understand and control them can significantly reduce (if not completely reduce to zero) the metaphorical, punning effect of the text, just as attempts to explain the humorous side of the joke to someone who did not understand it the first time are fruitless.

Orenburg


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