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JAPANESE ADVERTISEMENTS AND COMMERCIALS IN THE CONTEXT OF PRECEDENT-RELATED PHENOMENA: IDEAS AND IMAGES // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 2 (32). P. 112-135

Philosophers of postmodernism consider language to be not a passive mediator between reality and consciousness but a prism, through which people interpret the reality: J. Baudrillard said that mass media demonstrate people signs instead of reality. It is similar to the role that advertisements and commercials play. Ads and commercials reveal and, moreover, help create intentions and desires of society, and have a close relationship with it, being a kind of a guide for the recipient. It seems to be an issue of high importance to investigate the usage of precedent-related phenomena in Japanese advertisements and commercials to distinct how Japanese society represents, evaluates, and reflects itself, what images the society and the recipient can create through them. Precedent-related phenomena are verbal and non-verbal elements which are repeated in the discourse of a linguacultural community. There are several types of precedent-related phenomena such as precedent-related text, name, phrase, and situation. Being important in emotional and cognitive ways, precedent-related phenomena are often used in connotative meanings in order to reveal cultural values and associations within the recepient: precedent-related phenomena help express values and cultural concepts of a group or society. They make possible to estimate the product or to manifest one’s position on a global scale by comparing or contrasting a real situation with a precedent-related one. Therefore, precedent-related phenomena impact the recipient with all their linguacultural information, and imply additional characteristics. Precedent-related phenomena are used not only in oral or written speech, literature, but also in advertisements and commercials, which borrow all the above-mentioned features. Thus, such phenomena help imply positive meanings to the object of ads, draw attention to it, imply characterization, become a source of argumentation through emotional cognition, entertain the recipient and bring them aesthetic pleasure when a well-known precedent-related phenomenon becomes, for example, a part of a pun or a core part of narrative advertising. Precedent-related phenomena are frequently used in headings or slogans to catch the recipient’s attention or set the tone of an advertisement, to create a more complicated image of a product via associations. The analysis shows that, among all precedent-related phenomena in advertisements and commercials, names are used more frequently. Perhaps this is due to the necessity to introduce the protagonist, who will express the product’s advantages, into the conception. A precedent-related name can also build direct or indirect arguments. Recipients follow the advertisement’s plot, where familiar precedent-related names appear, and its twists and turns help hide the intentions of utilitarianism marketing. Precedent-related phenomena can also serve a function of a password: phenomena based on national culture dominate in Japanese advertisements and commercials. Among the different source-fields of the phenomena, the “History” field predominates, the “Fairy-Tales” comes second. This highlights Japanese society’s respectful and positive attitude to their history and culture. Ads and commercials create an image of a mono-national society, who understand and value their link to ancestors and their heritage, which all the Japanese are truly proud of.

Keywords: advertisement, commercial, precedent-related phenomena, communication, recognition, Japanese culture, history, literature, folklore, print