THE TEXT OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING IN THE MODERN DIGITAL MEDIA SPHERE (AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE POLITICAL SPOTS)

The article is an attempt to reveal the basic verbal and non-verbal characteristics of the text of English-language political advertising in the digital media space. Against the backdrop of the processes of digitalization and informatization of modern society a study of the peculiarities of institutional communication in the new conditions of the digital media sphere is acquiring more and more topicality. Despite the great diversity of works devoted to political communication linguists have not yet revealed the features of the text of political advertising created with the help of cutting-edge digital technologies and digital means of communication. Having analyzed more than 500 texts of English-language political spots, i.e. political commercials, published in 2007 – 2018, the author demonstrates that the use of digital technologies for forming a text of political advertising, first, reflects the common tendency for ‘tabloidisation' of politics and, second, provides a politician with new means of ‘politainment' for optimizing the influence on the recipient. In the article the text of political advertising is regarded as a specific digital media product different from its analogue equivalent. An analysis of the empirical material showed that in conditions of digitalization of the modern media sphere the text of political advertising acquires specific features that are unavailable or difficult to achieve with analogue means, such as audiovisuality, documentality, ‘game-like' character, intertextuality, hypertextuality and emotionality. The presence of these features in the text of political advertising is to be treated as a factor of increasing its effectiveness in conditions of growing political competition