Prosody of English television advertising: sociolinguistic features and pragmatic potential

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of linguistic, particularly phonetic factors affecting the perception of speech. It draws on the findings made in the course of the auditory analysis of the commercials under consideration. The paper analyses sociolinguistic factors influencing the choice of linguistic means in English television commercials to ensure the effective impact of advertising texts on the addressee, as well as the interaction of the pragmatic potential of oral informational texts with their prosodic organization. It proves that sociolinguistic features and pragmatic potential alongside with the prosody of television commercials contribute to the maximum influence on the addressee. The article substantiates the classification of structural components of English television commercials, which is used as a theoretical basis for further experimental phonetic study of prosodic means interaction in the analyzed texts. The research elaborates the matrix of alternative variants of structural-algorithmic schemes of linguistic means interaction of the television commercial content. Abstracting from the specifics of the text content, it allows theoretically to predict and experimentally trace both general changes of its prosodic organization, and the peculiarities of prosodic parameters interaction at structural boundaries.