Abstract

The immense role of advertising in modern world can hardly be limited only to persuading the addressee to buy a certain product. Its functions extend far beyond informing, influencing or stimulating and reach the level of cognition and conceptualization. The fact is advertising manipulates language to achieve its ends, and the strategies at its disposal are manifold. Moreover, it creates the substitute reality, which interferes with the recipient’s world view, thus realizing its manipulative potential. Manipulation as a specific form of hidden psychological persuasion involves two participants (a manipulator and a manipulated) and is aimed at psychological categories of anchors, targets, and social stereotypes. When extrapolated to the realm of cognitive linguistics, the above mentioned notions correspond to those of the frame of the addresser, the frame of the addressee and the basic concepts of advertising discourse. The purpose of this article is to view advertising discourse in terms of both pragmatics and cognitive linguistics in order to study the nature of manipulation exerted in it, to reveal the involved strategies, to single out the key concepts, which serve as the constituents of the world view, being simultaneously its reflectors and its moulders. In order to fulfil the objectives the wide range of linguistic methods has been employed. The methods of communicative approach in linguistics have been applied to single out the constituents of advertising as a complex speech macroact with the persuasive microact being the only obligatory one. The findings of linguistic psychology substantiate the manipulative nature of advertising. The functional analysis serves as the basis for revealing its communicative strategies. The application of the tools of cognitive linguistics enables the detection of six key concepts of advertising discourse and their conceptual markers.The modern American magazine advertising discourse within the period from 2009 to 2014 has been selected as the material for the research, with 2000 samples of advertising discourse being analyzed. The main conclusion to be drawn is that advertising contributes to moulding the addressee’s world view, thus affecting the way the recipient perceives the reality and shaping his/her values.To put it another way, advertising discourse causes shifts in human cognition and imposes on its recipients new ideals, standards and moral principles.

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