engleski

The pragmatic aspects of creative language use in advertising

It has recently become widely acknowledged that many phraseological units (PUs) are not fully frozen but variable in form. PUs can be used in discourse in their usual form and meaning, but they can also be deliberately and creatively changed in order to achieve certain semantic, pragmatic, and/or stylistic effects. In this paper we focus on the pragmatically motivated changes of PUs in the language of commercials and the effects such changes produce. The pragmatic function of PU modifications appears to be twofold: they may stimulate users to take a more active role in interpreting texts, and can be used to catch the attention of users in a humorous and witty fashion. It will also be shown that modifications at times fail to achieve the desired effect, which indicates that there are pragmatic constraints that need to be observed when modifying PUs.

phraseological units; pragmatic function; advertising; PU modifications; pragmatic constraints

nije evidentirano