Constructing a gendered consumer identity in a pragmalinguistic model of advertising discourse: The case of Russian and Polish.

摘要

The dissertation presents a theoretical model of the pragmatic structure of advertising discourse that accounts for the influence of the advertiser's perception of a target audience on the linguistic shape of the ad, and of the ad's linguistic shape on the perceptions of actual recipients. Framed in terms of knowledge transactions, the Advertising Discourse Model (ADM) explains the recipient's understanding of an advertising text as the linguistic representation of a fictional discourse scenario (FDS) from which selected knowledge items, including aspects of the fictional interlocutors' referential portraits, are foregrounded to signal salient points of the advertising message, including discourse features that define the ad's relevance to the target audience in connection with target features. Though displaced from the FDS, which is embedded into the real-world communication between advertisers and consumers, the recipient constructs an understanding of salient features of the FDS and its fictional participants in terms of knowledge items encoded in the text by the fictional speaker. Knowledge of promotional relevance causes the recipient to decode and interpret the ad's linguistic signals as a function of the target-consumer profile.;It is hypothesized that referential features of personas constructed by the language of an ad influence the recipient's perception of the personal relevance of the ad, leading to further cognitive processing of the message. The theory of 'identification' posits that a perception of self-relevance occurs on the basis of an instinctual recognition of features of one's self-identity. Using gender as the test variable, the analysis of over 1,500 Russian and Polish print ads reveals that gendered language phenomena are interpreted as referencing real-world gender and are used in advertising discourse to trigger identification with a gendered target. The investigation focuses on the use of grammatical gender, genderlect, and male/female semantic-associative fields in male and female ads whose audience is defined, at least in part, by gender. Drawing from field research in Russia and Poland, the study correlates native-informant perceptions of gender in ads with target gender. The investigation suggests a useful classification of ads according to the speaker types identified as the 'omniscient Seller', the 'corporate we', and the advertising 'script'.