A Comparative Study of Gender in the Language of Advertising

Abstract

This study sets to discover the linguistic tools used in advertising to represent gender. The study mainly focuses on exploring how gender is represented in two different cultures within the discourse of advertising, and revealing the implicit messages related to male and female representation in English and Arabic TV commercials. The study seeks to address the following research questions: How do verbal and visual modes of communication interchange and integrate in representing gender in Arabic and English TV commercials, what are the messages, specifically the implicit ones, which characterize gender representation in the advertisements of TV commercials, and what are the similarities and differences between gender representation in Arabic and English TV commercial advertising?. For this purpose, this study analyzes the selected TV commercials by utilizing two approaches: Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach (Machin and Mayr, 2012), and Multimodal Interactional Analysis approach (Norris, 2004). It aims to demonstrate that the representation of gender in advertisements is generated through the employment of the verbal modes, the visual communicative modes or through the integration of verbal and visual communicative modes. The study shows that there is a variation in the utilization of linguistic tools which represent gender in English and Arabic TV commercials, however, the similarities in employing these tools are more than the differences. In addition, the results reveal that the explicit and implicit messages related to gender representation, in English and