Blending As a Mode of Ensuring Efficiency in Social Advertisement

In: Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 2, Jazykoznanie = Lingustics, Heft 1, S. 30-43

Abstract

The article conveys the need to improve the efficiency of social advertisement. The relevance of the research undertaken is due to the lack of variety and low efficiency of most social-issue related advertisements, placed on posters and billboards, and the requirement for systematic assessment of impact means circulating in advertising. The authors dwell on the analysis of one of the most popular methods of increasing efficiency, namely blending, which is the formation of new words by combining their parts in unusual for the Russian language ways. In advertising this method is used mainly to enhance the expressiveness of the text due to the emergence of unusual associations that are easily created with this technique rather than to name new objects and phenomena. In the field of social advertising, purely graphic blends are distinguished, they are generated by the introduction of various graphic highlights of words or their parts, thus giving the slogan additional meaning; textual-and-graphic blends are constructed by imposing a part of one word onto another; text blends are presented in combining the name of the subject with the evaluative component. The authors also consider it reasonable to single out subject-logical contamination, the case when two completely different images of objects (or word forms) are merged into one image (or word form). Finally, visual blending is distinguished, parts of two objects are combined in one image to create a new image that realizes the idea of a poster; in textual-and-visual blending the meaning of a new combined visual image is explained with the text; lexical blending is formed by combining paronyms (sometimes rather loosely interpreted).