Critical Discourse Analysis Of Gender Stereotyping In Radio Advertising

This research intended to analyze the linguistic devices employed to construct gender stereotypes in Chinese radio advertisements. Eighty Chinese prime-time radio advertisements from three influential radio stations in China (China business radio, China news radio and China music radio) were collected on three consecutive Saturdays in January 2005. With Halliday's functional grammar as the analytical framework, the study takes the approach of critical discourse analysis to analyze the gender stereotypes embodied in the Chinese radio advertising language. Results show that men in the radio advertisements are constructed as authoritative, sensible, decisive and independent with the use of declaratives, imperatives, material processes, simple and clausal themes; women are portrayed as submissive, sensitive, caring and dependent with the application of exclamatives, interrogatives, and behavioral processes and multiple themes. With all these linguistic strategies, men and women characters in the advertisements are constructed into different social beings.