Abstract
The improvement of women’s social status has witnessed an increase of products and services specially designed for women and, therefore, an upsurge of related female advertisements. The extant studies mostly concentrate on the pragmatic analysis of advertising discourses and explore the implicit implications of gender and ideology in female advertisements. This research, by putting female advertising discourse in a commercial setting and case-studying the most sellable English fashion magazine, aims to figure out whether reason appeals or emotional appeals are more prevailing. Based on Halliday’s System-Functional Linguistics, advertisement appeals are studied through examining the quantitative relationship of the occurrences of Material process and Mental process. The advertising data are collected from the women magazine COSMO , including 50 pieces of full-page advertisements about fashion and beauty in 2011 and 2012. Firstly, the Wordsmith tool extracts the verbs and calculates the frequency of verbs. The Material process to Mental ratio is 7 to 3, which basically supports that there are more reason appeals in English women advertisements. Then, every sample as well as its context is studied for Critical Discourse Analysis, and the results verify the conclusion that English women’s advertisements employ more reason appeals. In light of the findings, recommendations are offered on how to build successful advertising discourses for women’s products.
Highlights
In modern society, advertising has pervaded every corner of our daily life so that some people even believe that the air we breathe is made up of hydrogen, oxygen and advertising
Every sample as well as its context is studied for Critical Discourse Analysis, and the results verify the conclusion that English women’s advertisements employ more reason appeals
Advertising language is the core part of advertisements, by which customers learn the information of commodity and services
Summary
In modern society, advertising has pervaded every corner of our daily life so that some people even believe that the air we breathe is made up of hydrogen, oxygen and advertising. With an enormous upsurge of interest in the studies of adverting discourses, there have been many researches on women advertising discourses. Most of those studies and researches on this subject have been devoted to the major levels of language organization in advertisements, including phonology, graphology, lexis and syntax (Vestergaard and Schroder, 1985). Harris and Jackson (1983) mentioned its cognitive features in Information processing research in advertising. Aman (1982) analyzed the cultural and anthropological dimensions of advertising discourses. Anthony (1993) referred to the status of advertising as a genre or register of discourse. Working within the tradition of critical discourse analysis, IJALEL 3(1):79-85, 2014
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