A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE BEAUTY ADVERTISEMNETS BY MAYBELLINE: THE 80’S AND THE PRESENT Faranak Modaresi a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree Master of Arts (MA) in General Linguistics at University of Amsterdam JUNE 2016 Supervisor: Ineke Vedder Co-Supervisor: Petra Sleeman 1 Acknowledgment I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to all the people who helped me through my studies. Foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Ineke Vedder for her continuous assistance and guidance. I would also like to thank my mother and my brother for all their love and support. 2 Abstract The research at hand employed a critical approach towards the discourse of advertising in order to ascertain the linguistic and visual features of the persuasive language in the beauty ads of the well-known cosmetics brand of Maybelline, during the 80’s and the time period of 2015-2016. The three-dimensional analytical model of Fairclough (1992) was used for the purpose of this research. The findings suggest that the beauty advertisements of both time periods employ different grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices. However, there are a number of differences in the type of the features they employed in the advertisements. The advertising texts in the past were more cohesive with the use of a lot of lexical and grammatical cohesive devices. The sentences were longer and had a more complex structure in the past. The visual elements of the ads have also showed a slight change. In the past there were four main parts; the headline, the body copy, the image, and the signature line. However, nowadays the image of the celebrity or the picture of the product covers most of the page and the texts are rather brief and do not follow a certain order. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, CDA, Rhetoric, Advertisement 3 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Chapter 1 5 1.1. Introduction 6 1.2. Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis 7 1.3. Rhetoric and The Art of Persuasion 8 1.4. Multimodal Discourse Analysis 9 Chapter 2 12 2.1 Theoretical Background and Framework 13 2.2. Previous Studies 14 Chapter 3 18 3.1. Method and Research Questions 19 3.2. Data 20 3.3. Data Analysis Procedure 21 Chapter 4: Results and The Discussion of The Ads Published In The 80’s 23 4. The Ads From The 80’s 24 4.1. Textual Analysis: Linguistic Elements 24 4.1.1. Reference 26 4.1.2. Substitution and Ellipsis 29 4.1.3. Conjunction 31 4. 2. Textual Analysis: Visual Elements 41 Chapter 5: Results and The Discussion of The Ads Published In 2015-2016 45 5. The Results of The Ads From 2015-2016 46 5. 1. Textual Analysis: Linguistic Elements 47 5. 2. Textual Analysis: Visual Elements 56 Chapter 6: Comparison 59 6. Comparison 60 6.1. Similarities and Differences in Linguistic Elements 60 6.2. Similarities and Differences in Visual Elements 63 Chapter 7 65 7.1. Conclusion 66 References Appendix 4 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 5 1. Introduction The media and advertisement as a powerful source in forming the public thoughts and desires, provide an invaluable source for the research on language. Although the advertisement discourse is very brief, it is very complex in nature. The persuasive language of advertisements has become the focus of attention for many discourse analysis studies in recent years. Some researchers employ the traditional approach of looking at linguistic elements of advertisement language, while other scholars such as Fairclough (1995) employed a more critical approach and analyzed the procedures and the type of language that these adverts employ in order to persuade their audience to act. Cook (2001) looked at the interaction of the verbal and visual elements in the language of advertisement and studied how they relate to each other and contribute towards meaning; in his opinion advertising discourse is then a combination of language and images. As stated by Cook (2013) the Collins Concise Dictionary defines advertising as “the promotion of goods or services through sale through impersonal media” (p. 9). In his opinion language and symbols in advertisements work to persuade, inform, misinform, amuse or warn people. Therefore, advertisements change people’s mind and make them buy the products they do not want or need (Ayasuriya, 2015). According to Cook (2013) persuasive language of advertising is filled with connotations, ellipsis, conjunctions, collocations and frequent use of first and second person pronouns. Advertising as a creative field and a growing industry, has provided an enormous opportunity for discourse studies. Much research has been dedicated to the language of advertising from different theoretical points of view. Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis are two of the approaches mostly taken towards the advertising discourse; which is known to be persuasive and informative (Woods, 2006). To be able to define what is discourse analysis, it is crucial to describe what is discourse first. Discourse is anything that is beyond the level of a sentence; for example, two people in a conversation or two sentences that are connected is considered as discourse. On the other hand, discourse is language in use, how people put the language in use in different contexts and situations. Weedon (1987) defines discourse as “…ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations that inhere in such knowledge and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and 6 producing meaning” (p, 108). What follows is an overview of Critical Discourse Analysis, the notion of Rhetoric, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, which is of importance for the current research, since it helps us to find out the procedures and the type of language that adverts employ in order to persuade their prospects. 1.2. Critical Discourse Analysis For a long time the traditional approach of Discourse Analysis has been taken towards language with the aim of describing pieces of discourse and how they function, however in the 70’s a more critical view of discourse analysis emerged. Critical Discourse Analysis is concerned with the manifestation of social and political inequalities in discourse (Wooffitt, 2005). The main purpose of CDA is to examine how people are manipulated and persuaded by public discourse and how they undergo power. It is an interdisciplinary approach, which studies the abuse of power by texts. Fairclough (1989) defines Critical Discourse Analysis as a kind of social practice where power and ideology influence and interact with one another. Van Dijk (1996) suggests that Critical Discourse Analysis is a type of analytical discourse research that discusses social power abuse, dominance and inequality. Wodak (2006) states “CDA [is] fundamentally interested in analyzing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control when these are manifested in language. In other words, CDA aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, constituted, and legitimized by language use” (p. 53). CDA at the starting point had more of a critical linguistics approach to text analysis but in later years incorporated more social, cognitive and rhetorical aspects of language and broadened its scope of analysis. Two groups of scholars in the late 70’s emerged who had a new approach towards discourse; Critical Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). These two notions are often used interchangeably, however, CDA, which is the focus of this research, deals more with the interaction of language and power in addition to the effect of language on the society. Hodge and Kress (1993) along with Fowler and Kress (1972) were among the leading scholars who paved the way for investigating the language critically by analyzing ‘texts’. The type of discourse analysis they performed was based on the theoretical 7 foundation of Halliday’s metafunctional grammar and Systemic Functional Linguistics, which was based on the premise that language and society are inevitably connected. Nevertheless, there were limitations in CL as a system, some of which are the ones argued by Fairclough (2006) who states this type of discourse analysis considers text as a product rather than considering the production and interpretation of it. In 1989, Fairclough published the book Language and Power; a pioneer work in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis, in which he proposes a framework for examining the interaction of language and social practice. His main concern was the interactions of language and power. Fairclough’s ideological doctrine can be used in everyday practice; advertisement texts as well as political texts are subject to his analysis. One major development in the field has been achieved following a conference in 1991, at the University of Amsterdam, where a group of linguists gathered and discussed the theories of Discourse Analysis. Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen and Ruth Wodak, discussed various approaches and their similarities and differences. The emergence of the term Critical Discourse Analysis traces back to the work of Fairclough Critical Language Awareness in 1992, in which the ‘critical approaches’ to discourse analysis was outlined and he used other terms such as Critical Language Awareness (CLA) and Critical Language Studies (CLS). Later in the edited version of his book Critical Language Awareness, Fairclough use the term ‘critical discourse analysis’ and categorized it as a form CLS. In 1995 the book named Critical Discourse Analysis was published and the term was confirmed (Billig, 2003). 1.3. Rhetoric and The Art of Persuasion Rhetoric is one of the various dimensions of discourse and therefore it is difficult to distinguish the principles of rhetorical analysis from those of discourse analysis.