The aesthetic ideal of a modern woman in English-language advertising: sociolinguistic aspect

Abstract

This article is devoted to the topic of gender stereotypes and ways of their verbalization in language by the example of the aesthetic ideal of a modern woman in the texts of English-language advertising. The rapid development of feminism as a social and cultural phenomenon has been reflected in various types of discourse – from artistic to advertising. The redistribution of social roles between women and men caused, first of all, the transformation of the image of an ideal woman both at the level of external characteristics and at the level of the axiological paradigm of a woman's personality as a full-fledged member of society. The main means of constructing the concept of the "ideal woman" at the text level are keywords. The lexical and semantic analysis of the description of women in English-language advertising allowed us to make our own classification of the dominant components of the aesthetic ideal of a modern woman based on the theory of archetypes, which determines the novelty of the study. The most famous archetypes of ancient Greek goddesses are taken as a basis. It has been established that the modern English-language advertising text extrapolates four leading archetypes: "the seductress woman" (Aphrodite), "the hearth keeper woman" (Hestia), "the independent woman" (Artemis) and "the warrior woman" (Athena). The choice of an archetype is carried out according to the practical and social orientation of the advertised product. The perspective of the research is seen in the comparison of these archetypes with female images in Russian advertising discourse, taking into account the specifics of linguistic, cultural and sociolinguistic identity