AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF SPEECH IMPACT IN ENGLISH MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

In English media discourse speech impact is made through various means among which the linguistic devices are of special importance. It is necessary to analyze the effectiveness of different linguistic devices found in ads as they have a great influence on consumer choices. The advertising industry has evolved throughout the previous decades, thus causing the emergence of new psycholinguistic aspects of discourse which need to be researched thoroughly. It is thanks to experimental researches that advertisements are viewed as sociocultural units. Ads’ comprehension differs among various groups that include people of different age, gender, as well as people having diverse levels of language fluency. One of the most commonly accepted experimental methods of measuring the effectiveness of linguistic units is the semantic differential scale. Charles E. Osgood's theory of the semantic differential is a general attempt to measure the semantics of words, particularly adjectives, and their referent concepts. The respondent is asked to choose where his or her position lies on a scale between two polar adjectives. For the purpose of measuring the effectiveness of given ads, the respondents of our experimental survey were asked to rate how fun, concise, catchy, interesting and effective the given groups of ads are. The evaluation was based on a 7-point scale between the polar adjectives. The evaluation was based on the effectiveness of five groups of ads – composed of phonetic, graphical, metaphorical, punnical and syntactic devices. In conclusion, it has to be mentioned that the effectiveness of ads heavily depends on the utilized linguistic devices that facilitate comprehension and memorizing. The linguistic devices that create mental tension and relief after understanding or decoding messages have higher rates of effectiveness. The ads that are created with the help of puns or wordplay are more effective than the ads created with the help of graphical devices. Overall, it can be stated that the most effective advertisements contain syntactic or metaphorical devices.