Critical Discourse Analysis Of Gender Stereotype In English TV Advertisements

This research intends to analyze the linguistic devices employed to construct gender stereotypes in English TV advertisements.Gender stereotypes are not identical with reality. They may cause prejudices and discriminations. There are gender stereotypes embodied in advertisements. Because of its commercial foundations, advertising has to reflect gender stereotypes for the sake of the recognitions of the audiences. By watching the advertisements, the audiences gradually construct their own perceptions of gender which are highly stereotyped.So far, most researches on gender stereotypes in advertisements both at home and abroad are conducted on the basis of content analysis with few having gender stereotypes embodied in advertising discourse analyzed from critical point of view. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is aiming at exploring the ideology in language in the service of power. It can be used as an effective tool for examinations of gender stereotypes in advertisements. What is more, the data collected in this thesis is mainly from English advertisements which can influence and reinforce gender relationships as part of the material culture. Therefore, this study is constructed to explore gender stereotypes embodied in English advertisements with Critical Discourse Analysis, in order to help the audiences to become aware of the ideology disguised in advertising and to raise their consciousness with gender stereotypes.One hundred and forty-five English prime-time advertisements from two influential TV stations (BBC from England and NBC from USA) were collected between 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm on Saturday in September 2010. With Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as the analytical framework, this thesis takes the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze the gender stereotype embodied in English advertising language. By the aid of statistics, the results show that men in the English advertisements are presented as sensible, authoritative, and independent with the use of declaratives, imperative, material processes, simple and clausal themes; while women are constructed as sensitive, submissive, and dependent with the use of exclamatives, interrogatives and behavioral processes and multiple themes. With the help of these linguistics devices, men and women characters in the English advertisements are portrayed into different social beings. So all of these are worthy of further study.