The syntactic means of emphasis in the English promotional discourse

Abstract

The article considers the emphatic patterns of syntactic structures used for highlighting communicatively relevant elements in promotional discourse with a strong persuasive effect. The research was conducted on the material of 19 automobile promotional brochures containing valuable information about automobile brands and their manufacturers for the target audience. The aim of the research was to study emphatic structures occurring in the English promotional discourse and determine the most frequently used types of emphasis. The study found that the emphatic displacement towards the anaphoric syntactic position occurred most frequently for underlining semantically relevant speech elements. The anaphoric emphasis is intended for the rhematization of thematic parts, which, nevertheless, does not diminish the significance of the cataphoric position, being traditionally occupied by the rheme. In addition, the syntactic emphasis was actively accompanied by discursive intensifier words, which, according to the quantitative data, were used in the middle of the emphatic sentences most frequently, thus fulfilling the function of retaining attention in continuation of the emphatic beginning. Due to the rheme displacement and discursive words, the entire emphatic structure becomes in the focus of readers’ attention against the background of surrounding discourse. The most common syntactic means of emphasis, in descending order, are the following: fronting, pseudo-cleft and cleft sentences, inversion, elaborative, introductory and duplicative sentences. The results of the research can be used for teaching linguistic text analysis and applied aspects of linguistics to students specializing in linguistics and professional English to students majoring in advertising and PR.

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