Diachronic Aspect of Advertising Discourse: The Use of Polysemy and Homonymy in Advertising Slogans (Based on the IKEA Catalogues for the USA)
The article highlights and describes the characteristic features of using polysemy and homonymy in American IKEA catalogs in terms of diachronic approach. The aim of this study is to identify the trends in the use of polysemy and homonymy in advertising texts. In order to trace the dynamics of the use of these phenomena, eleven American IKEA catalogs were analyzed: for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019, and 2020. Each catalog contains between 97 and 102 advertising slogans, of which between 2 and 15% are slogans with poly-semantics and homonyms. The analyzed IKEA catalogs were found to contain 40 slogans with polysemy and 33 slogans with homonymy. The study revealed a clear increase in the total number of advertisements with polysemy and homonymy in IKEA catalogs over the past 2 years. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the approach to the study of polysemy and homonymy in advertising texts: these phenomena are perceived as a conscious violation of a stereotype, aimed at enhancing the expressiveness of the advertising text to achieve the material goal that is the sale of the advertised product or service. Moreover, the article analyzes polysemy and homonymy in terms of their functions, tracing the frequency of their use in catalogs in the last two decades. The functional features of the phenomena have been identified: all the slogans with polysemy and homonymy perform compressive, aesthetic, semantic and manipulative functions. At the same time, the entertainment function is more often realized in slogans with homonymy: out of 33 advertising slogans containing homonyms, 27 perform the entertainment function, while only 15 out of 40 slogans with polysemy are aimed at raising the mood of a potential customer.