Hypotyposis in Heterogeneous Screen Texts: Case Study of ASMR-Videos

This article examines the peculiarities of the functioning of the rhetorical figure hypotyposis in an atypical for its nature type of the text - a heterogeneous screen text. The relevance of the study is determined by the supremacy of such texts in modern communication and their increasing influence on the formation of public opinion, including the use of implicit manipulations, constructed by rhetorical means. The aim of this article is to examine means of constructing hypotyposis in heterogeneous screen texts. ASMR-videos published on the online platform YouTube were chosen as the research material. Descriptive techniques (observation; generalization; interpretation of observation results; classification; analysis; synthesis; comparison), contextual and distributive analysis, as well as functional-pragmatic analysis were chosen as the research methods. The following results were found in the course of the study. In heterogeneous screen texts, in particular ASMR-videos, the hypotyposis is constructed on the basis of metonymic and metaphorical connection arising between the verbal and non-verbal units in the course of their constellation in the screen “speech”. It is regulated by the analytical synaesthetic code, which has a number of subcodes: auditory-visual, visual-auditory, visual-tactile and visual-objective. The use of hypotyposis in ASMR screen texts “depicts” the invisible - the viewer-recipient experiences certain perceptual sensations from stimuli that do not really exist - a simulation of reality. Besides, a semiotic “nest doll” of codes allows to control the consciousness of the spectator-recipient, creating fascination. This article is aimed at students, graduate students, teachers, linguists, philologists, and anyone else interested in general and linguistic semiotics.