MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF UNIVERSITY SLOGANS IN RUSSIA, KAZAKHSTAN AND USA

Abstract

The article highlights a problem of defining advertising potential of university slogans through their modal and pragmatic characteristics. The topicality of the research is predetermined by the increasing rivalry and struggle among higher educational institutions for the would-be students and by the application of complex functional-pragmatic, linguocultural, comparative analysis to the language means in the text of slogan. Slogans represent missions, visions and core values of the universities, and the provided discourse analysis reveals different modal meanings underlying the relations between an author of the slogan text, a text itself, a recipient (target audience) and objective reality. Three main types of interpersonal modality have been singled out: deontic modality (directive), epistemic modality (descriptive) and axiological modality (evaluative), and corresponding functions of language units have been specified and compared in non-related languages: Russian, Kazakh and English. As creolized texts, slogans combine verbal and non-verbal layers; the visual image enhances the impact on the target audience.