The article is written in support of necessity in studying composition and purpose of the argument for each type of discourse separately. A classification of argument types is proposed for verifying specifics of argumentation within the social advertising discourse, in particular, arguments are divided into rational and emotional, and within each group they split into internal and external. An internal argument is an inseparable element of the thesis, it indicates the internal logic of thought development. An external argument is independent but related to judgment. It is easily extracted from the text with its content. Among the internal rational arguments, the frequency in social advertising demonstrates arguments to reason, interpretation, circumstances and condition. Among the external rational arguments there are facts, information, links to laws and statistics. The most frequent type of the internal emotional arguments is the argument for fear. In addition, there exist arguments to shame, self-preservation, fashion, self-esteem (among threat arguments) and arguments to advantage, benefit, promise, approval, patriotism (among promise arguments). Finally, among the external emotional arguments there are examples, illustrations, patterns, characteristics and an argument for authority. The article presents the argumentative specificity in certain thematic groups of social advertising. Advertising on "Man and Law" covers references to laws, statistics, information imparting, and cause as the most popular rational arguments. The "Health" group demonstrates rational arguments which formally prevail, nevertheless arguments to fear, self-preservation, compassion, and opposition are most frequent among the emotional ones. In advertising on "Culture" dominates emotional arguments with a positive coloring (to benefit, to success, to approval, to curiosity). The "Family" group is marked by objective emotional arguments for sympathy and promise. In the "Ecology" group emotional arguments that appeal to the addressee lead, causing fear of extinction of all living beings, while the objective ones call to assist animals.

The article clarifies the concept of discommunication, defines its place among the related concepts of communicative failure and communicative conflict, and suggests ways of studying discommunication at the discourse level. A new interpretation of discommunication is proposed in the framework of the linguoecological approach to communication developed by V.I. Shakhovsky. Discommunication is treated as an umbrella term that unites various manifestations of ineffective communication which can occur due to many reasons. At the intercultural and intracultural levels, discommunication can result from non-implementation or incomplete implementation of the communicative intention, failure to achieve the communicative goals, or their mismatch. The resulting ineffectiveness of communication and the ineffectiveness of the communicative interaction are due to a number of reasons, both linguistic and extralinguistic, among which are violation of ethical norms and ecology of communication; non-observance of the rules of argumentation; using manipulative strategies; unsuccessful verbalization of the intention by the addresser. The latter is exemplified in detail with the excerpts from the Russian-language courtroom discourse. It is represented through violations in goal-setting and errors in the formulation of the idea. Expanding the list of discourses for analyzing discommunication will allow identifying the specifics of its implementation in various speech genres and types of communication, and help determine its causes and outline ways to overcome it.

The article states that the basis of the specialist’s speech competence constitutes the ability to create appealing speech works in the required genre in accordance with the situation, the audience and the communication goals. In this regard, it is evident that the development of private rhetoric is necessary for various professional spheres. The authors describe the principles of building such rhetoric as a system of professionally significant genres and propose a specific variant of the genre model, focused on a rhetorical understanding of professional communication. This model includes not only the positions which are traditionally included in the model of the speech genre (addressee and addresser, the purpose of speech and etc.) but also the positions which are characteristic only of a rhetorical genre (the value system and composition), and, what is more, these parameters are to form a recognizable “face” of a rhetorical genre.

We investigate hidden comparisons that are relevant for advertising texts, created on the basis of lexical superlatives – marker words with an estimated value of high quality, superiority, originality, uniqueness, ideality, exemplaryness, etc. We show that the use of such hidden comparisons, not related to specific objects or phenomena, with which the advertised product/service is compared, is a striking feature of modern advertising texts. We substantiate that hidden comparisons created on the basis of lexical superlatives, demonstrating the advantages, superiority of the advertised goods/services over all others, increase the persuasiveness of the advertising text, enhance its effectiveness. We prove that hidden comparisons created on the basis of lexical superlatives provide emotional representation of information about the advertised object in the advertising text and perform a text-forming function, forming the dominant meanings of advertising.

The article conveys the need to improve the efficiency of social advertisement. The relevance of the research undertaken is due to the lack of variety and low efficiency of most social-issue related advertisements, placed on posters and billboards, and the requirement for systematic assessment of impact means circulating in advertising. The authors dwell on the analysis of one of the most popular methods of increasing efficiency, namely blending, which is the formation of new words by combining their parts in unusual for the Russian language ways. In advertising this method is used mainly to enhance the expressiveness of the text due to the emergence of unusual associations that are easily created with this technique rather than to name new objects and phenomena. In the field of social advertising, purely graphic blends are distinguished, they are generated by the introduction of various graphic highlights of words or their parts, thus giving the slogan additional meaning; textual-and-graphic blends are constructed by imposing a part of one word onto another; text blends are presented in combining the name of the subject with the evaluative component. The authors also consider it reasonable to single out subject-logical contamination, the case when two completely different images of objects (or word forms) are merged into one image (or word form). Finally, visual blending is distinguished, parts of two objects are combined in one image to create a new image that realizes the idea of a poster; in textual-and-visual blending the meaning of a new combined visual image is explained with the text; lexical blending is formed by combining paronyms (sometimes rather loosely interpreted).