A Critical Discourse Analysis Of British And American Advertisements For Female Cosmetics

The pursuit of beauty is human nature.Using cosmetics is one of the most important means for human beings,especially for women,to achieve physical beauty.Nowadays,cosmetics have become an indispensable part to the life of women and their advertisements can be seen everywhere in our daily life.Female cosmetic advertisements,on the one hand,reflect current social situation and,on the other hand,exert some influence on consumption ideas,values,aesthetical standards and lifestyles of the general public.Thus they have the property of ideology.If female consumers fail to obtain a clear understanding of ideologies hidden in them,it might be very likely for them to be adversely influenced,which might lead to their rash spending or,what’s worse,formation of wrong values.First developed in Britain in the late 1970s,Critical Discourse Analysis,CDA for short,is a discipline focused on discourse analysis.It is also an interdisciplinary approach to studying and explaining social problems.CDA aims at disclosing ideologies through the analysis of linguistic forms.This thesis approaches British and American advertisements for female cosmetics from the perspective of CDA which might help uncover ideologies hidden in them and explore the constructive function of the advertising language.A total of 60 samples of British and American advertisements for female cosmetics were selected from world-famous official websites and a fashion magazine,Harper’s Bazaar.Based on scholars’ previous studies on advertising,their analysis is conducted under Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Discourse Analysis Framework and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar.This thesis consists of 6 chapters and a conclusion.The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the background,objectives,significance,methods and data of this study and the structure of this thesis.The second chapter firstly introduces the definition and functions of advertising;then it gives a general review of the previous studies on advertising from the perspective of CDA both at home and abroad.The third chapter firstly expounds 3 useful concepts in CDA(namely,the concepts of discourse,power,and ideology)and their relationships to each other;then,it comes to the introduction to Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Discourse Analysis Framework and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar.The fourth chapter employs 4 useful vehicles,namely,lexical choice,transitivity,modality,and personal system in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,to conduct a textual analysis of the collected samples,aiming to unveil ideologies hidden in British and American advertisements for female cosmetics.The fifth chapter is mainly a discussion conducted from the three processes of discursive practice,namely,production,distribution and consumption,so as to illustrate how ideologies revealed in the fourth chapter realize their function of construction.The sixth chapter is the social practice.It is mainly concerned about the influence of the whole social context on the encoding of ideologies in British and American advertisements for female cosmetics.In other words,it provides a further analysis and explanation of the ideologies revealed.The last part is a conclusion.It summarizes some major findings and limitations of this study.Meanwhile,it gives some recommendations for further studies in this area in the future.The major findings of this study are as follows:Firstly,the results of textual analysis indicate that different ideologies are embedded in British and American advertisements for female cosmetics.They include the following three aspects:the first one is the gender ideology that women are generally described as emotional,passive and dependent,and that they need extra protection and can only do some relatively simple and unchallenging work;the second one the ideology about beauty,which claims that being young and natural is being beautiful;and the third one the ideology established in the business world,which includes beliefs that customers are viewed as ’God’ or ’Goddess’ in the business world and that the world is problematized.Secondly,the analysis of discursive practice shows that ideologies revealed in this thesis actually spring from the society and in turn work subtly on female customers to reinforce or reproduce their existing ideologies.Thirdly,the analysis of the social practice shows that three social determinants,namely,women’s social status,views on beauty in modern society,and economic development,can be generalized to explain why these ideologies revealed are embedded.It is hoped that by conducting a critical discourse analysis of British and American advertisements for female cosmetics,this study will strengthen the critical consciousness of female consumers and meanwhile eliminate people’s some discriminative beliefs against women.