Phraseological units as components of pun in advertising slogans (on the material of the German language)

Abstract

The article examines mechanisms of building up puns in phraseological units in German advertising slogans. The online portal Slogan.de serves as the source for the language material and represents an extensive electronic database of slogans. The material of the electronic archive Slogan.de is presented on the examples from 35 economic branches. The aim of this study is to analyze the processes of building puns through the interaction of phraseological units within the pragmatic aspect of advertising texts, as well as the systematization of these processes. The relevance of the article is based on the fact that phraseological units are the object of special interest to linguists due to their variability. Phraseological units are also considered in this article in the paradigm of such a social and pragmatic phenomenon as the language of advertising. Advertising is designed to influence its recipient − to call for action, to convince, to waive objections. An advertising slogan has an even more specific purpose. Being a pragmatically oriented phenomenon, the slogan has its function to express the company’s philosophy as concise as possible, to evoke an emotional response and ensure its memorability. The slogan contains a complex of unique linguistic solutions and is mainly related with a deviation from the norm and building up a wordplay. Phraseological units also have a wide cognitive and linguapragmatic potential. They allow puns into their structure due to their variability. Methods of continuous sampling and semantic analysis were used. The paper analyzes and systematizes the main methods of constructing puns in phraseological units in their direct relationship with the extralinguistic context. The selected examples were divided into two main types of mechanisms: puns built up by changing the word and syntagma (at the phonetic, morphemic, lexical and syntactic levels) and puns built up without changing the word and syntagma. The paper states that a pun is closely related with the context of the advertising slogan and information about the product advertised.