GRAMMATICAL DOMINANTS IN EDUCATIONAL ADVERTISING TEXT

Abstract

Educational advertising is a less-explored area within the field of advertising discourse for linguists. The increase in advertising activities in the educational services sector is driven by the development of market relations, the commercialization of education, educational institutions entering the global educational space, and socio-political changes in society. A balance between rationality and emotionality is an essential characteristic of texts that advertise higher education institutions. The linguistic elements of an advertising text – whether it’s a prospectus, brochure, or flyer – are dedicated to creating a positive image of the university and achieving a pragmatic effect. These elements are employed in all structural components and linguistic levels of the text. Morphological units, interacting with lexical and syntactic levels, form a coherent and expressive advertising text. Analyzing these texts revealed a general picture of morphological resources, the productivity of lexico-grammatical classes, and their role in the main parts, including their semantic, emotional-evaluative load, and communicativepragmatic potential. The texts of educational advertising examined showed the most productive parts of speech, revealing a difference from the commonly accepted notion among commercial advertising researchers about nouns and verbs being the key parts of speech. The productivity of the main morphological units in educational advertising texts is represented in descending order: “nouns – adjectives – verbs – adverbs – pronouns”. Among nouns, abstract nouns and those with a secondary lexical meaning of action are predominant. These nouns reflect the conceptual components of education, academic activities, and the outcomes of education. Verbs make the text dynamic and active, denoting actions related to education, research, and results. Adjectives most comprehensively provide the evaluative-emotional component of advertising texts for higher educational institutions. Qualitative adjectives are used for image characterization of universities, semantically conveying a highly positive evaluation, while relative adjectives specify nouns that represent the extensive system of educational activities. Adverbs are most often used for the evaluative characterization of actions expressed by verbs. To achieve advertising success and maximally attract the attention of the target audience, pronouns are used. They realize their influential potential primarily in short slogans or concluding phrases, directly addressing the recipient. The digital representation of numerals reflects the substantive, and occasionally expressive, aspect of the information. Verbal representation serves to express the uniqueness of the educational institution, thus acting as an image-building tool.