Linguistic and Cultural Characteristics of Vaccination Social Advertising in China
The aim of the study is to identify the linguistic and cultural characteristics of social advertisements promoting vaccination in the PRC through contextual and semantic analyses of verbal and non-verbal components that represent the specifics of Chinese culture. The study allowed us to determine the semantics of visual and graphic elements, as well as to identify lexical and stylistic means of advertising. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time an attempt is made to reveal lexical, stylistic and visual-figurative means of Chinese social advertising acting as a kind of culturally marked “arguments” in favor of vaccination. In the course of the study, we have observed such means as metaphors, repetitions, parallelisms, alliteration, rhetorical statements, appeals in the form of imperative constructions. The advertising components convey the following axiological criteria of Chinese culture: collectivism, cohesion, patriotism, joint fight against the pandemic, respect for the family. In our opinion, the combination of verbal and non-verbal elements that actualize the key values of Chinese culture had a positive effect on the percentage of vaccinated people among the Chinese citizens.