Advertising and gender: Proposal, design and application of an analytical model for studying gender metaphors in print advertising in English (Spanish text)

Recent research has advanced the idea that advertising is one domain where an orientation to the reader is crucial in securing rhetorical objectives. For that, advertisers tend to use different communicative strategies. One of them is studied in this thesis: the gender metaphor, a term coined by Fuertes Olivera (1999) to refer to metaphors whose mappings can create discrimination toward men or women.; The main goal of this research aims to propose, design and apply a flexible analytical model which can be used to uncover gender metaphors in print advertising in English. In short, the following themes are introduced: (1) The Critical Discourse Analysis helps to analyse advertising, uncovering its functional and semiotic nature. (2) Advertising English is a specialised language, language. (3) The advertising channel determines advertising communication. (4) The advertising slogan is a specialised text that uses metadiscursive strategies to create a persuasive text under an informative mask. (5) The advertising sexism is syncretic and implicit, hence its denomination of “semiotic sexism”. (6) The advertising metaphor is a discursive heuristic device that presents three different types of formal codings: verbal, non-verbal or hybrid. (7) The gender advertising metaphor is made up of three different types: the universal gender metaphor, the cultural gender metaphor and the metaphoric gender.; The proposed model for analysing the gender advertising metaphors is applied to a textual sample made up of 930 slogans and 1610 advertising metaphors taken from 1142 commercial advertisements published in 12 issues of the British edition of Cosmopolitan in 1999 and 2000. This model is also integrated in a MySQL software, the database “Anuncios”.