Stylistic Devices on Social Advertising Posters: Verbal and Visual Means

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of the composition of the means of expression, traditionally considered purely verbal, but used in social advertising in visual and verbal-visual form. The aim of the work is to establish the degree of prevalence of verbal and visual forms of traditional types of figures in modern social advertising and to describe their role in the implementation of the author’s idea. The relevance of the research is due to the increased interest in the study of polycode texts and the formation of the visual stylistics of the text. The material was 4000 posters of environmental topics collected from various media banks on the Internet by a continuous sampling method. The authors conclude that contamination and gradation are used only in visual form in environmental advertising. Contamination consists in combining parts of different images into a single image, which, however, does not receive a common name. Gradation is based on contrarian relations, with its help the transformation of some objects or states into others is shown in dynamics. Verbal-visual techniques include antithesis, parallelism, amphibolism. Antitheses are often based on contextual antonyms, concretized by the presence of an image, and in some cases such antitheses are qualified as quasi-logical. Parallelism can be represented by both verbal and purely visual forms in the form of placing two pictures similar in content on one poster. With the help of amphiboly, a paradoxical meaning is given to the slogan, since the visual and verbal series come into conflict. Finally, only in verbal form are ellipsis and anaphora used. The ellipsis makes the poster text as concise, energetic and convenient as possible for quick reading. Anaphora allows you to emphasize the element of the slogan that carries the main semantic load. The other types of stylistic figures (inversion, frame, chiasmus, etc.) are quite rare in environmental social advertising and generally do not affect the nature of its image system.