Language Features of Social Advertising in Russia and France

Public service announcements, as one of the main genres of advertising, are one of the most effective and efficient mechanisms for influencing mass audiences. Texts of social advertising include a diverse range of linguistic means of expression, which, by creating expressiveness and emotional coloring, perform pragmatic and motivational functions in the formation of basic patterns of behavior and ideas of the mass consciousness. This paper aims to identify and compare linguistic features of social advertising texts from two countries (Russia and France). The research is based on the communicative, regulatory, and interactive approaches to studying the discourse of social advertising as well as functional characteristics of this genre proposed by Russian and foreign linguists. The empirical study consists of a comparative analysis of Russian and French-language texts of social advertising according to four linguistic levels. The results of this work reflect a wide range of linguistic devices application in the texts of this advertising genre and demonstrate the most frequently used linguistic strategies and tactics in Russian and French social advertising.