Abstract
<p>Guided by gender theories and focusing on an advertisement of Motorola’s cellular phone as a case study, this study explores the construction of gender roles through Transitivity choice<strong> </strong>in commodity advertising. After<strong> </strong>a detailed description, interpretation and explanation of the gender roles encoded in the advertising text, this study gets the following findings: 1) Ideological conceptions and social consciousness can be expressed in a text through verbal presentation and also revealed through the arrangement of linguistic devices or resources like Transitivity processes. 2) Influenced by current gender ideology, commodity advertisements tend to represent women with strong desires for self-fulfilment. 3) The advertising of a magic product which can help fulfil a woman’s self can stimulate women’s desire for its purchase and thus promote its sale. 5) The construction of gender roles through linguistic choice in commodity advertising can infuse or indoctrinates new concepts of gender roles into people’s mind. Hopefully, this essay can improve people’s awareness of how ideology is encoded in linguistic devices and how ideology controls the choice of linguistic resources.</p>
Highlights
Commodity advertising discourse is a kind of commercial discourse and a kind of cultural discourse, which may connote different social norms and living styles
Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis and guided by gender theories and focusing on an advertisement of Motorola’s cellular phone as a case study, this study explores the construction of gender roles through Transitivity choice in commodity advertising
Interpretation and explanation of the gender roles encoded in the advertising text, this study gets the following findings: 1) Ideological conceptions and social consciousness can be expressed in a text through verbal presentation and revealed through the arrangement of linguistic devices or resources like Transitivity processes
Summary
Commodity advertising discourse is a kind of commercial discourse and a kind of cultural discourse, which may connote different social norms and living styles. Studies of commodity advertising texts can contribute to the exertion of commodity advertising discourse’s consumption-oriented function in commercial promotion, to people’s awareness of the influence of commodity advertising discourse on their ideology and to people’s objective view of the current social value orientation, social relations and cultural psychology. The current writing is an attempt to uncover the hidden gender ideology in advertising discourse and its effect on the establishment of satisfactory gender roles in our social and cultural context and on the motivation of people in purchasing goods through analyzing the Transitivity choice in a commodity advertising text concerning Motorola’s cellular phone. We will first make clear some terms and the method that will be used in this research
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