10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15518
application/pdf
1974-4382
15518
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Annarita Taronna
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
mediAzioni
ELF
A Multimodal Analysis of Gender Representations in British and Italian TV Advertisements
Text.Serial.Journal
https://mediazioni.unibo.it/
34
Articles
2022-09-22
2022-09-13
2022-09-22
2022-09-22
A116-A141
M
Annarita Taronna
2022/09/22
10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15518
A116
Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro
1974-4382
ELF
en
A141
A Multimodal Analysis of Gender Representations in British and Italian TV Advertisements
https://mediazioni.unibo.it/article/download/15518/14683
34
Updating Discourse/s on Method/s                                       mediAzioni 34 (2022)
                                                                             ISSN   1974-4382



A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF GENDER REPRESENTATIONS
    IN BRITISH AND ITALIAN TV ADVERTISEMENTS
                             LAURA CENTONZE, ANNARITA TARONNA
                                     UNIVERSITY OF BARI

laura.centonze@uniba.it, annarita.taronna@uniba.it



Citation: Centonze, Laura and Annarita Taronna (2022) “A multimodal analysis of
gender representations in British and Italian TV advertisements”, in Lucia Abbamonte
and Flavia Cavaliere (eds.) Updating Discourse/s on Method/s, mediAzioni 34: A116-A141,
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15518, ISSN 1974-4382.



Abstract: The present paper illustrates the preliminary findings of a CORECOM-funded
project called “The representation of the image of women in advertising: interlinguistic
and multimodal perspectives”. Its aim has been to identify, analyze and deconstruct
semantic asymmetries which continue to proliferate in the field of information and
communication, thus perpetrating discursive constructions of stereotyped and
discriminating gender identities. Drawing on the most influential contributions to the
study of language and gender (Lakoff 1975, Goffman 1979, Cameron 1995; Christie
2000, Lazar 2005, Jeffries 2007, Baker 2008, Mills 2008, 2012, Machin &amp; Caldas-
Coulthard 2016), the present research has identified possible pragmatic
characterizations leading to the identification of subliminal, discriminating or degrading
advertising messages which provide the audience with the image of a stereotyped
woman or allusively associated, for example, with an aesthetic canon based on beauty
as an absolute value. To this end, the comparison between advertising messages
disseminated on the regional, national and international territory has brought out
quantitative and qualitative data that have allowed us to define the extent to which the
presence of gender stereotypes and sexualization of the female body are occurring in
regional and national advertising in relation to some European countries. Reference has
thus been made to advertisements in English in both English-speaking and non-English-
speaking countries. Consequently, the results of interlinguistic and comparative research
have also brought out useful data for the definition of pragma-linguistic patterns
characterizing ELF (English as a Lingua Franca; Seidlhofer 2001) in advertising.

Keywords: women representation; multimodality; advertisements; stereotype; ELF.




Copyright © 2022
The text in this work is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.                                      A116
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1. Introduction

This article illustrates the partial results of a one-year multidisciplinary research
project entitled “The representation of the image of women in advertising:
interlinguistic and multimodal perspectives”, funded from June 2020 to June
2021 by CORECOM Puglia1. The overall goal of the project was to identify,
analyze and deconstruct semantic asymmetries which still proliferate in the field
of information and communication, thus perpetrating discursive constructions of
stereotyped and discriminatory gender identities in regional and national
advertising. In order to address the research aims of the present study, a corpus
was compiled with a view to conducting a comparative analysis of female
representations in TV advertisements across a wide range of products and
services in the English-speaking context. More specifically, the study corpus (i.e.
the WOMen in Advertisements, henceforth WOM-AD corpus) collects 120
advertisements (60 Italian and 60 from English-speaking countries) and their
relevant metadata that have been examined drawing on the relevance of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA: Fairclough and Wodak 1997; van Dijk 2001). The
results of this interlinguistic and comparative research have also brought out
useful data for the definition of pragma-linguistic patterns characterizing ELF
(English as a Lingua Franca; Seidlhofer 2001) in advertising.
     The relevance of such a research project lies in the urgent need to prevent
and combat the tacit emotional and symbolic violence driven by gender
stereotypes in advertising (Capella et al. 2010) by recalling the strategic goals of
inclusivity, women empowerment and gender equity as strongly advocated by
current national and international plans (i.e. the Italian Development
Cooperation System, the European Parliament’s 2013 Resolution on eliminating
gender stereotypes in the EU, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the
Gender Action Plan II and III, the Istanbul Convention). These urgencies are
evoked by the potentially negative effects of using stereotypes in advertising,
that is, viewing women as exclusively sexual beings whose purpose is to sexually
arouse and gratify men. Due to potential perceptions of women as appropriate
targets for sexually aggressive behaviors (Lanis and Covell 1995: 647),
differences in gender representation in advertisements have been widely
investigated, and a recent study by Stanković et al. (2018) has shown men’s more
dominant role in conveying a verbal message, whereas women are
predominantly given a visual role in commercials.
     More prominently, differences of stereotypical gender representation in
advertisements provide a better insight into their body language, as the findings
will show later on in this study. Men are usually portrayed in a laid-back manner,
with an attitude of dominance, legs spread apart, looking straight into the
camera, illustrating the concept of masculinity, which implies rationality and
self-confidence to the viewer. On the other hand, women are usually represented
sitting or standing, legs crossed, arms resting on their bodies, thus conveying a
1
 The authors were respectively involved in the project as Principal Investigator (Laura Centonze)
and Scientific Coordinator (Annarita Taronna) affiliated with the Department of Education,
Psychology, Communication, University of Bari, Italy. For the present study, although the
research was jointly conducted by the authors, Laura Centonze is responsible for Sections 3 and
4, whereas Annarita Taronna is responsible for Sections 1, 2, and 5.
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message of their emotionality, even subordination, to the viewer (FemCities
Conference 2012: 10). These cues predict the process according to which
advertisers as cultural intermediaries engender provocative stereotypes and have
become embroiled in a perceptual shift that glamorizes violence against women.


2. Theoretical background

The potentially negative effects of constructing stereotypes in advertising also
explain how the study of gender roles has evolved around distinctive research
fields closely aligned with current societal and cultural changes (Åkestam et al.
2021). More remarkably, since the 1990s Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough
and Wodak 1997) and Visual Analysis (Berger 1973; Goffman 1979 Kress and
van Leeuwen 1996; Rose 2007; Schroeder and Borgerson 1998) were undertaken
to critically interpret advertisements and the symbolic values behind their texts
and images. As discussed in more detail in Section 3, a Critical Discourse Analysis
approach allows one to explore discourse as a form of social practice that may
undermine the relationship between language and power by providing insights
into how language is used and the values, beliefs and ideas that underpin its
context. By conceiving of language as a medium for interaction, analyzing
discursive strategies and pragma-linguistic devices in the construction of
stereotypes may facilitate a better understanding of what people do and how
structures, strategies and properties of text and talk play a role in reproducing
social power relations and resulting inequalities.
     The analysis of textual data in the next sections builds up to broader
categories, looking for patterns of consistency and variation, as well as relevant
discursive features within texts by comparing findings for the British and Italian
corpus sub-sections. To this end, as Leech envisioned in 1972, investigating the
use of language in advertising can either follow “a prescribed path of advertising
clichés” or have the freedom to “deviate from it and from the rules of the
language itself” (Leech 1972: 4). Since language, gender and society are three
complex and closely interwoven terms, the question of identifying discursive
strategies and pragma-linguistic devices reflecting or shaping social life and
consequently gender relationships and expectations plays a pivotal role
throughout this study. Bearing this in mind, the description of linguistic outputs
will be integrated with the analysis of appraisal categories (i.e. engagement,
attitude and graduation) elicited through specific examples of ELF in advertising
and specially related to the interpersonal meta-function set in terms of hedges
(i.e. use of emotional and persuasive lexicon, modality and personal pronouns).
     Against this backdrop, it is part of our role as language scholars to
“investigate, reveal and clarify how power and discriminatory values are
inscribed in and mediated through the linguistic system” (Caldas-Coulthard and
Coulthard 1996: xi) because such preferences are not arbitrary, but textual
materializations of a writer’s or speaker’s ideologically laden interests. As a
result, the identification of visual and linguistic patterns in the advertisements
gathered in the study corpus may help reveal problematic gendered discourses
as well as highlight important moments of resistance to them. In particular, the

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visual analysis carried out in this study includes a description of each
advertisement with a focus on the main objectifying and stereotyping
representational techniques, namely, attention to body parts, representing
women as sexual objects and portrayals of women as victims of violence, as
highlighted by Schroeder and Borgerson (1998).
    Building on this, the proposed analysis enables the visual effects of the
images to be tied to discourse by exploring how certain elements of female
images become conventionalized and why they may emerge in particular co-
texts. It is important to note that our study does not seek to uncover or decode
any kind of essential “truth” lurking beneath a gender stereotype in terms of
image or text. Instead, it is of interest to this study how visual and discursive
effects may serve to persuasively unveil meanings about gender stereotypes
questioning how emotional violence against women may be enacted through
meaning-making processes of visual representation and pragma-linguistic
patterns. The combination of these two approaches can be combined in the
theory of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), whose tenets contribute to
analyze, interpret and decode how words and images in the selected
advertisements act as basic tools for projecting gender misrepresentation in
society.
    In the light of these assumptions, it is also worth mentioning that gender and
multimodality have been recently explored from a critical perspective thanks to
Machin, Caldas-Coulthard and Milani’s research (2016), which raises questions
about the affordances used by communicators in each context of usage and the
ideological purposes they are meant to accomplish, so that meanings about
gender and sexuality are uncovered. More recently, the pervasive ideologically
and ethically questionable nature of advertising has been propelled by feminist
thought and remained timely and relevant due to the evolution of gender roles
in society that challenge traditional gender-hierarchy structures and raise ethical
considerations about female representation in the media (Azar et al. 2018;
Tsichla 2020; Liljedal et al. 2020; Zayer et al. 2020).
    Although the investigation of gender stereotypes was initiated in the 1960s,
today, almost sixty years later, social movements like #MeToo and Time’s Up
breathe new life into the conversation about women’s sexualization and
objectification. Indeed, the exploration of gender portrayals continues to
generate thought-provoking findings such as those images of active, confident or
sexually powerful women and loving fathers, evident in the advertising appeals
of “dadvertising” and “femvertising” (Åkestam et al. 2017; Kapoor and Munjal
2019). The term “dadvertising” is used to describe commodified representations
of fatherhood suggesting that “the new ideal masculine man is an involved
parent and an emotionally vulnerable partner” (Bukszpan 2016) and appealing
to a female audience through gender egalitarianism in service of personal and
familial empowerment politics. Hence, men are depicted as being regarded as
heroes by their children, devoted fathers, loving husbands, and less often,
domestic workers, thus invoking positive responses regardless of people’s
ideological perspectives on gender. Similarly, the term “femvertising” refers to
the evolution of female portrayals in advertising into a new, “sexually powerful”
woman who is in control and gets what she wants because she is sexually

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attractive, as opposed to being sexually objectified in order to be looked at or
consumed for male gratification.
     Although these new gender portrayals have been recently introduced in
advertising, the need for regulations on the use of stereotypes has still widely
emerged worldwide, and in 2017 the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)2,
among other authorities, outlined new rules giving advertisers six months to comply
with them. In 2019 the ASA also introduced a ban on adverts featuring “harmful
gender stereotypes” and those which are likely to cause “serious or widespread
offence”, as well as “to restrict the choices, aspirations and opportunities of children,
young people and adults”3. Similarly, in 2018 a survey on gender role stereotypes
and the social image of violence was carried out by the Italian ISTAT as part of a
collaboration agreement with the National Department of Equal Opportunities,
allowing the analysis of cultural models and factors influencing attitudes towards
violence against women. The agreement4 provided for the establishment of an
Integrated Information System on violence against women, a multiple-source
system tracking data on the phenomenon of violence against women in its various
forms and allowing the quali-quantitative monitoring of this phenomenon. Though
from a narrower and translocal perspective, this study attempts to encourage similar
regulations for the multimodal representation of gender stereotypes in advertising
advocating for a cultural change and an ethical responsibility that may contribute
to deconstructing discursive patterns and semantic asymmetries of power and
gender inequality.


3. Methodology: an integrated approach

For the analysis of TV advertisements, we drew on the relevance of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA: Fairclough and Wodak 1997; van Dijk 2001) as it
provides a useful interdisciplinary approach for the analysis of both linguistic
and extralinguistic textual characterizations. In particular, Fairclough’s (1992)
three-dimensional CDA model clearly defines the different stages involved in
multimodal text analysis and is taken as a reference point throughout the study:




                  Figure 1. Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional CDA model

2
  The organization administering the UK Advertising Codes and covering both broadcast and
non-broadcast adverts, including online and social media.
3
  The report for the Advertising Standards Authority (prepared by Debra Crush and Polly
Hollings,     Final     issue:    13     July      2017)    is    available     online   at:
https://www.asa.org.uk/asset/A397D8C9%2DF641%2D4EF2%2D948F37E1D20F958F/                (last
accessed 3 July 2021).
4
  The agreement is available online at: https://www.istat.it/en/violence-against-women (last
access 3 July 2021).
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As can be seen, the model includes three dimensions (i.e. text, interaction and
context). Each corresponds to a different level of analysis: description (text
analysis), interpretation (processing analysis) and explanation (social analysis).
Following this model, the advertising frames were isolated along with their
visual elements; related to the processing and social analysis phases, all the
information deriving respectively from the 1) production and reception of
advertising and 2) the representation (whether stereotyped or not) of the
woman’s body and image were collected and sorted out by advertising frame
(Goffman 1976).
     To this end, the categories of gender representation formulated by Goffman
describing signals and behaviors relevant in terms of gender will also be
examined (ibid.: 123) and, more specifically, the following: the relative size, or
the height of a man as an element that distinguishes and reflects social weight,
authority and fame with respect to women in occupational contexts; the feminine
touch, in relation to the image of a woman touching the outline of an object with
her hands and fingers to bring out its characteristics; the function of employment,
when a man would seem to play an executive role in working contexts, despite
the fact that he collaborates side by side with a woman in the workplace; the
family, whose visual representation may indicate the role played by each of its
members; the ritual of subordination, or the stereotype of deference, which consists
of lowering one's gaze or physically prostrating oneself, whereas keeping a high
gaze and a straight body is a sign of superiority and contempt.
     When analyzing the stereotypical representation of women in advertising,
the categories in Plakoyiannaki and Zotos (2009: 1417) were also taken as a
reference point. The following table summarizes the taxonomy of their model:

    Table 1. Stereotypical female roles in advertising according to Plakoyiannaki
and Zotos (2009: 1417)
                 Category                                      Description
  Women in Traditional Roles
  1. Dependency                                1. Dependent on male’s protection; in need
                                               of reassurance; making unimportant
                                               decisions
  2. Housewife                                 2. Women’s place is at home; primary role is
                                               to be a good wife; concerned with tasks of
                                               housekeeping
  Women in Decorative Roles
  3. Women Concerned with Physical 3. Women in pursuit of beauty and physical
  Attractiveness                   attractiveness (e.g. youthful)
  4. Women as Sex Objects                      4. Sex is related to product; sex is unrelated
                                               to product
  Women in Non-Traditional Roles
  5. Women          in    Non-Traditional 5. Engaged in activities outside the home
  Activities                              (e.g. golf, football)

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  6. Career-Oriented Women                     6. Professional occupations; entertainer;
                                               non-professional; blue-collar
  7. Voice of Authority                        7. The expert
  Women Portrayed as Equal to
  Men
  8. Neutral                                   8. Women Shown as Equal to Men


According to Plakoyiannaki and Zotos (2009), the “dependent woman” and the
“housewife” categories are among the traditional and recurrent representations
of women in advertising. The former, unable to make important decisions,
depends on her husband, who protects and reassures her; the latter is a woman
whose only role is to look after the family and take care of the housework. The
woman’s decorative roles include the attractive woman and the “woman-object”.
The attractive woman is constantly in search of external beauty and is in most
cases a young woman, whereas the “woman-object” is depicted as a woman in
an erotic and sensual sense, in which there is no reference either to the advertised
product or to the male audience. On the other hand, non-traditional roles portray
the woman engaged in activities outside the household, not only practising
sports, but also in the professional realm as a career woman, who has decided to
take control of her own life, thus acquiring the professional skills that make her
expert in her chosen field. The last category highlighted by Plakoyiannaki and
Zotos concerns women represented in a symmetrical relationship with respect to
men, therefore with equal opportunities and social roles. For the purposes of the
present study, the categories described above were considered and compared
with findings for the Italian section of the corpus, thus highlighting any
(un)equal representations of women in advertising.
     Given the multimodal nature of the discourse of advertising, one cannot
avoid considering its textual features as combined with its visual elements in
order to determine its message and, most of all, how any stereotypical
representation is rendered and perceived by the audience. For this reason the
theoretical background has been integrated into the approach offered by
Appraisal Theory (Martin and Rose 2003) to investigate linguistic features in the
study corpus and, in particular, any stereotypical use of language. Appraisal
theory is strongly related to discourse-semantics and represents a cognitive-
functional model for the evaluation of the language being employed. In
particular, for our study we will focus on a specific aspect of appraisal theory
related to the so-called attitude system, namely, Affect (resources for expressing
feelings), Judgment (resources for evaluating character and behavior) and
Appreciation (resources for evaluating the worth of things and phenomena).
Figure 2 below illustrates how Affect, Judgment and Appreciation are
interconnected in expressing emotions in relation to text:




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                         Figure 2. Affect-Judgement-Appreciation relationship
                              (adapted from Martin and Rose 2003: 174)

In line with Martin and Rose’s (2003) scheme illustrated above, where Affect
refers to the different linguistic resources for expressing emotions and feelings,
the transcripts of all the British advertisements in the study corpus were
transcribed and sorted out for both women and men. This also allowed for the
identification of Judgment and Appreciation patterns, respectively, as instances
for social esteem/sanction and how social phenomena are valued according to
social conventions.
     In addition, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF: Seidlhofer 2001) is here taken
into consideration as the language by means of which worldwide companies
operate and carry out marketing campaigns outside their local environment. In
relation to our analysis, the notion of ELF inevitably has to be taken into account
for two main reasons: 1) because the people involved in the advertisements often
belong to different lingua-cultural backgrounds due to their origins and thus
their use English for mutual understanding, and 2) for the potentialities that
English as a common language certainly has for the marketing campaigns of a
product together with the power of reaching different people around the globe.


4. Corpus and findings

In order to address the research aims of the present study, a corpus was compiled
with the aim of conducting a comparative analysis of female representations in
TV advertisements across a wide range of products and services in the English-
speaking context.
    The study corpus, i.e. the WOMen in ADvertisements (henceforth WOM-AD)
corpus, collects 120 advertisements (60 Italian and 60 from English-speaking
countries) and their relevant metadata. One has to specify, however, that whilst
the selection of TV advertisements for the English corpus section was deliberately
made for the purposes of the present analysis, the Italian selection criteria for
TV advertisements were predetermined by CORECOM Puglia in the preliminary
stages of the research, which makes the two corpora rather heterogeneous in
their nature. In addition, due to the rather low quality of the recorded audio files
for the Italian section of the corpus, the whole process of linguistic annotation
predominantly concentrated on the retrieval of any stereotyped linguistic forms
occurring in the advertisements. Notwithstanding this, the different selection

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criteria for the two sub-corpora did not affect any aspect of the analysis, whose
methodology is entirely shared by both sections. Indeed, the Italian section of
the WOM-AD serves the need for a comparative analysis with advertisements
from English-speaking countries and will play a pivotal role in the discussion of
the findings.
     Drawing on the integrated approach illustrated in the previous sections, the
study has first aimed at highlighting frequencies for each of the categories
proposed by Plakoyiannaki and Zotos (2009) by analyzing each frame
multimodally, in all their visual and linguistic elements, in search of stereotyped
representations as well as instances of femvertising (Rodríguez Pérez and
Gutiérrez Almanzor 2017; Varghese and Kumar 2020; Elhajjar 2021).
Afterwards, a selection of distinctive frames taken from the WOM-AD will be
analyzed (Section 5).

4.1. General information on the WOM-AD corpus

From the 60 video files for the English section, 273 advertising frames were
extracted5. Tables 2 and 3 respectively represent the absolute values (n) and the
percent values (%) of the distribution for the advertising frames. In this section,
we report the data for both the English and the Italian sections of the study
corpus, although for the purposes of our analysis we will consider the English
section, whereas the Italian will be used for the sake of comparison in the
Discussion of Findings section.

        Table 2. Advertisement frames in the WOM-AD corpus
                                   Advertisement frames

                                                 n            %
                    English section             273         68.25
                    Italian section             127         31.75

                    Total                       400          100


As regards the advertised goods and services in the English section of the study
corpus, most of them concern body care and cosmetics (25%), followed by food
and shopping (20%), technology (15%), health (10%) and sports and leisure
(8.33%), and to less common categories, such as jewelry/fashion and cars,
animals, desserts, furniture and finally training.




5
  Sources for EN advertisements: https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/marketing/top-campaigns-the-
50-best-brand-adverts-of-2020/651468.article;
https://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2020/12/10/the-best-ads-of-2020/?sh=66f0a81c7dcd
(last accessed 3 July 2021).
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        Table 3. Products and services in the WOM-AD corpus (EN)
                      Goods and services in the WOM-AD corpus (EN)

                                                   n           %
                  Cosmetics/body care              15          25
                  Food/shopping                    12          20
                  Health                           6           10
                  Animals                          2          3.33
                  Desserts                         2          3.33
                  Sports/leisure                   5          8.33
                  Jewelry/fashion                  3            5
                  Cars                             3            5
                  Training                         1          1.68
                  Furniture/house                  2          3.33
                  Technology                       9           15

                  Total                            60         100


Furthermore, the distribution of women in the English section of the WOM-AD
corpus appears to be rather diversified, with women being more frequent than
men in advertisements: co-presence of women appears to be recurrent in the
study corpus, whereas the presence/co-presence of men and women appears to
be confined to fewer cases. The following tables respectively summarize the
findings for the presence/co-presence of women and men as well as their
presence in relation to the advertised product in the English section of the
corpus:

       Table 4. Female (co-)presence in the WOM-AD corpus (EN) according to
advertised products and services
                      Female co-presence in the WOM-AD corpus (EN)

                             Woman      Women       Woman-   Woman-Man-     Tot.
                              (n)        (n)         Men      Child(ren)    (n)
                                                      (n)        (n)

 Cosmetics/Body
                               5               9        1            -       15
     Care

  Food/Shopping                2               4        4            2       12

       Health                  4               2        -            -       6

       Animals                 2               -        -            -       2

       Desserts                1               1        -            -       2

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  Sports/Leisure            2                  -            2          1       5

 Jewelry/Fashion            3                  -            -          -       3

         Cars               3                  -            -          -       3

       Training             1                  -            -          -       1

 Furniture/House            2                  -            -          -       2

    Technology              3                  3            1          2       9

        Total               28             19            8             5       60




      Table 5. Percentage (%) for female (co-)presence in the WOM-AD corpus
(EN) according to advertised products and services
         Percentages (%) for female co-presence in the WOM-AD corpus (EN)
                             Woman             Women   Woman-   Woman-Man-     Tot.
                              (%)               (%)     Men      Child(ren)    (%)
                                                        (%)         (%)
Cosmetics/Body Care              8.3           15      1.6         -          25

Food/Shopping                    3.3           6.7     6.7        3.3         20
Health                           6.7           3.3      -          -          10
Animals                          3.3               -    -          -          3.3
Desserts                         1.7           1.7      -          -          3.4
Sports/Leisure                   3.3               -   3.3        1.7         8.3
Jewelry/Fashion                   5                -    -          -           5
Cars                              5                -    -          -           5
Training                         1.7               -    -          -          1.7
Furniture/House                  3.3               -    -          -          3.3
Technology                        5                5   1.7        3.3         15
Total                            46.6      31.7        13.4       8.3         100


The presence and co-presence of women in the English section of the WOM-AD
appears to be predominant, with an overall 46.6% and 31.7% respectively for the
presence of one woman or the co-presence of women; generally speaking, women
appear to be more recurrent in the cosmetics/body care context (25%), followed by
food/shopping (20%), technology (15%) and health (10%). Interestingly perhaps,
the percentage for the co-presence of woman-man appears to be lower with respect
to female presence: this is confined to the contexts of cosmetics and body care,
food/shopping as well as to sports and leisure activities. The woman-man-child(ren)


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co-presence is also very low if compared to the other identified categories (only
8.3%) and is found in the food/shopping, sports/leisure and technology categories.

4.2. Female roles in the WOM-AD corpus

Drawing on the taxonomy provided by Plakoyiannaki and Zotos (2009), we
identified and categorized any stereotyped role emerging from the study corpus.
For this specific aim, each advertisement was broken down into frames, since each
of them was characterized by the occurrence of more than one role category. In the
analysis, 273 frames were identified and sorted out by role. The following table
summarizes the findings for stereotyped and non-stereotyped roles within the study
corpus:

        Table 6. Overall female role distribution in the WOM-AD corpus (EN)
                 Female role distribution in the WOM-AD corpus (EN)
                                                n           %

                Traditional roles              65         23.8
                Decorative roles               64         23.4
                Non-traditional roles          103        37.8
                Equal roles                    41          15
                Total                          273         100


Figures for the overall distribution of women in the study corpus show a
prevalence of non-traditional roles (37.8% in the entire EN section of the corpus),
whereas the frequency of traditional roles and decorative roles appears to be lower
and balanced (respectively 23.8% and 23.4% in the study section of the corpus);
equal roles (i.e. the instances in which women and men are depicted as having
equal opportunities) account for 15% of the study corpus – which is still a
relatively high value, if we consider the 41 instances found.
    Non-traditional roles (n=103) depict women as active, dynamic and not
simply devoted to the household: these are women taking control of their own
social life and being successful in their professional careers. Figures 7-12 are
frames taken from three advertisements in the study corpus, Wotsits Giants, Clairol
Australia and Dove, respectively.
    In Wotsits Giants, the main protagonist is a woman who is responsible for
awarding the Guinness World Records label. She is depicted in her role of judge
and the following close-ups allow us to see her as she performs her leading role,
wearing a uniform.




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               Figures 7-8. Wotsits Giants Guinness World Records advertisement6

Additionally, the language she uses is performative, as can be seen in the
transcription of the dialogue in the advertisement provided below:

    Man       Here at the walkers factory we’ve been attempting to make the
              biggest what’s in [.] our [.] I think our chances are really good at
              setting the world record we’ve been working on this for months so
              we can make this record on the day we got the team together we
              made one that was a meter long the team pulled together and said I
              think we can do better than that we’ve got to four meters six meters
              and by the end of the day we’re eight meters I’m open today that we
              can smash eight meters and get away
    Woman     (Paulina Sapinska): I’ve seen a lot of attempts for large food items in
              my time but I have not seen an attempt for the longest puffcorn
    Man       so the challenges have been how do we season it and how do we
              dehydrate it because our current systems would not allow that size fruit
    Woman     I’m happy to announce that Wotsits Giants has achieved a new
              Guinness world records title for the longest puffcorn measuring 10
              meters 66 centimeters, congratulations, you are officially amazing!


If we take a closer look at the turns of dialogue above, the language used by both
speakers provides useful insights into pragmalinguistic characterizations in ELF,
stereotypical roles along with some deconstructing strategies. By applying
Martin and Rose’s (2003) Affect-Judgement-Appreciation relationship scheme,
we selected the following excerpts:




6
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwyYRCvIS9o (last accessed 6 August 2021)
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A129                                                                 CENTONZE, TARONNA



       Table 7. Lexico-grammatical realization of Martin and Rose’s (2003)
Affect-Judgement-Appreciation relationship in Wotsits Giants advertisement
                                    Man’s exchanges
                 (Wotsits Giants Guinness World Records advertisement)

             Text                 Item          Appraised       Polarity      Lexico-
                                                                             grammar
                                                                            realization
   Here at the walkers          In/secure        -Paulina       +affect      Hedging
   factory we’ve been                            Sapinska                      Verb
   attempting to make                             -Advert                   Superlative
   the biggest                                   audience
   what’s in our I think        In/secure         Paulina       +affect      Adjective
   our chances are                               Sapinska                      Verb
   really good at setting                         Advert
   the world record                              audience
   we’ve been working
   on this for months
                                  Woman’s exchanges
                 (Wotsits Giants Guinness World Records advertisement)
   I’ve seen a lot of            Secure        Wotsits Giants   +affect       Verb,
   attempts for large                           employees                   Superlative
   food items in my
   time but I have not
   seen an attempt for
   the longest puffcorn
   I’m happy to                  Secure        Wotsits Giants   +affect      Adjective,
   announce that                                employees                   Verb phrase
   Wotsits Giants has
   achieved a new
   Guinness world
   records title for the
   longest puffcorn
   […]
   congratulations, you
   are officially
   amazing!


Emotion is one of the greatest resources speakers have at their disposal in order
to convey their feelings, and this is included in Martin and Rose’s Affect category.
As can be seen from the table provided above, there are some differences in
woman-man representation in the Wotsits Giants advertisement (Figures 7-8),
and this transpires from their use of ELF throughout the advertisement (Table
7). The man appears to be assertive to some extent (with only one case in which
he uses a superlative form with reference to his own work, i.e. the biggest
[puffcorn]), but he prefers to resort to hedging expressions through the use of
verbs in the continuous aspect (we’ve been attempting, we’ve been working, I think
our chances are really good). The stereotyped role of the hard-working man is re-

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dimensioned by the woman’s dominant role of judge evaluating a man’s
performance through the use of adjectives and highly performative language to
convey – adopting Martin and Rose’s (2003) terminology – her Judgment (i.e.
I’ve seen a lot of attempts for large food items in my time but I have not seen an
attempt for the longest puffcorn) and her Appreciation through extremely positive
adjectives and expressions (i.e. I’m happy to announce that Wotsits Giants has
achieved a new Guinness world records title for the longest puffcorn […]
congratulations, you are officially amazing!).
     The second example is taken from Clairol and shows a woman who is dyeing
her hair on her own, without going to the salon. She is represented in all the
different steps that are required, with close-ups of her hair before and after the
procedure. In the two frames provided below (Figures 9-10), she respectively
shows the procedure she follows to dye her hair and the final result on the right,
showing it off with a smiling and satisfied face.




                                     Figures 9-10. Clairol7


       Woman     I am going to brave it and colour my own hair with nice and
                 easy 8WR. I have never coloured my own hair before
                 Oh I've gone wrong
                 Nice and easy


Additionally, the language she uses conveys a sense of empowerment and
autonomy, as well as ease. First-person pronouns (I am going to brave it and colour
my hair; I have never coloured my own hair before) emphasize this, and the
adjectives “nice and easy” (which are also part of the Clairol Nice ’n Easy line)
as well as the sentence “Oh, I’ve gone wrong!” constitute a proof of the informal
context in which the easy-going woman operates, without any idealization.
    The use of first-person personal pronouns with an interpersonal function
(Halliday 1985) clearly helps to establish a particular relationship between the
woman who is advertising the product and the target audience who might be
interested in trying out the product.



7
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i63lQHtoRT8 (last accessed 5 August 2021)
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   Table 8. Lexico-grammatical realization of Martin and Rose’s (2003) Affect-
Judgement-Appreciation relationship in Clairol – woman’s exchanges
                      Woman’s exchanges (Clairol advertisement)
     Text                   Item               Appraised        Polarity         Lexico-
                                                                                grammar
                                                                               realization

     I am going to        Secure /            Women             +affect       Verb phrase
      brave it and        insecure         interested in
     color my own                         dying their hair
     hair with nice
       and easy 8
       wr. I have
     never colored
      my own hair
         before
      Oh I've gone        Insecure            Women              -affect      Verb phrase
        wrong!                             interested in
                                          dying their hair
     Nice and easy         Secure             Women             +affect        Adjectives
                                           interested in
                                          dying their hair

Table 8 exemplifies the use of ELF in relation to the expression of the woman’s
self-empowerment and combines it with Martin and Rose’s (2003) categories.
Throughout the short advertisement the woman appears to be self-confident by
trying out the product on her own hair: this is rendered through the use of the
verb “going to” (I am going to brave it and color my own hair with nice and easy 8
wr.), expressing the speaker’s intention, and a present perfect simple form (I have
never colored my own hair before) in order to express the exceptionality of the
activity which is going to be carried out. After a moment which includes some
uncertainty and insecurity on the part of the woman (Oh I’ve gone wrong!), the
advertisement ends up recalling the Nice ’n Easy line of Clairol Australia hair
products by means of the evaluative and attitudinal lexis (nice and easy) which
the woman uses in order to “judge” and provide feedback about the product.
     The third example of a non-traditional role is represented by the Dove
advertisement. This is one of the most striking examples in the corpus as it is
dense in deconstructed stereotypes – hence, for reasons of available space, we
here report on just two:




                                     Figures 11-12. Dove (1)8

8
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts3CT6IbwUw (last accessed 27 July 2021)
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Here in this advertisement the main topic is the deconstruction of a stereotype
feeling of shame related to the underarms. Hence, the advertisement frames are
each characterized by the overlays “Hello X” followed by parts of women’s body
and personality (e.g. “Hello Me”, “Hello Smooth”, “Hello Style”, “Hello Hair”,
“Hello Choice”, “Hello Colour”, Hello Festivals”, “Hello Gym”) and “Goodbye” (e.g.
“Goodbye Judgment”), with the final statistical statement that “88% of women feel
society promotes an ‘ideal’ underarm” and the final remark “The only thing your
underarm shouldn’t be is a worry”. Below is the transcript of the advertisement,
which is in contrast with what is stated in the overlays, as can be seen:

        Man          Introducing new Dove
        Woman1       Athena's underarms must be flawless
                     fixed door causes outrage
        Woman2       so what's wrong with these
                     I would love for the ideal underarms to just not exist
        Woman3       my hair underarms do not define my womanhood
        Woman        I don't cover up anymore
                     I love showing my underarms
        Woman        you kind of had it and you could be happy
        Woman        my touching you don't pitch reflect me
        Woman        my team tells me to grow my under arms
        Woman         I like my own face
        Woman        my dog don't hold me back
        Woman        mine you just have to guess

        Woman        let me introduce you to business and festival disco
        Woman        I think I quite care
        Woman        I've always admired people who do their own thing with
                     conviction and confidence
        Woman        everyone is normal and everyone is different


The lines highlighted represent a monologue that each woman in the
advertisement performs as they are staring at their underarms. The transcript’s
function is to highlight the contradictory feelings related to the non-acceptance
of one’s own underarms (“what’s wrong with these”; “my hair underarms do not
define my womanhood”; “I think I quite care”; “I’ve always admired people who
do their own thing with conviction and confidence”; and “everyone is normal
and everyone is different”. Drawing on Martin and Rose’s (2003) model, we
selected instances for lexico-grammar realizations in ELF which reflect, among
other things, gender stereotypes or the women’s wish for the acceptance of
difference:


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       Table 9. Lexico-grammatical realization of Martin and Rose’s (2003)
Affect-Judgement-Appreciation relationship in Dove – women’s exchanges.
                                Women’s exchanges (Dove)
        Text                 Item              Appraised   Polarity   Lexico-grammar
                                                                        realization
I would love for          discourage            Women       -affect    Verb phrase +
the ideal                                                               would love
underarms to
just not exist
my hair                     Secure              Women      +affect      Verb phrase
underarms do
not define my
womanhood
I think I quite        Insecure/Secure          Women      +affect        Hedges
care
I've always                 Secure              Women      +affect      Verb phrase
admired people                                                         Abstract Nouns
who do their
own things with
conviction and
confidence
Everyone is                 Secure             Women and   +affect      Verb phrase
normal and                                       men                     Repetition
everyone is                                                              Adjectives
different


The first example I would love my hair just not to exist with its negative polarity
in terms of affect describes a feeling of discouragement on the part of the woman
for the unbearable situation in which she finds herself: not being socially
accepted because of her hairy underarms. This feeling is rendered through the
use of two verb phrases in contrast with each other: an affirmative/positive one
(i.e. I would love ….) is then followed by a negative verb phrase (to just not exist).
The second instance My hair underarms do not define my womanhood is rather
assertive in its tone, and this is signaled by the presence of a negative verb phrase
in the present tense which sounds rather polemic as a statement. The third
example is iconic in that it expresses the feeling of insecurity which the woman
is undergoing by means of such a lexico-grammatical device as hedging (I think
I quite care). The last two examples, respectively, I’ve always admired people who
do their own things with conviction and confidence and Everyone is normal and
everyone is different both represent a way of promoting social inclusion through
the acceptance of diversity. More specifically, whereas the former sentence
makes use of a very positive verb phrase (expressed by the verb admire in its
present perfect form) and two key abstract nouns (i.e. conviction and confidence),
the latter example is characterized by the repetition of the indefinite pronoun
Everyone in a sort of logical reasoning in which normality means accepting
difference and difference is normality.

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    Traditional roles (n=65) in the study corpus include those roles in which the
woman is represented as stereotyped in either her canonical beauty or her role
within society. The following frames are taken respectively from Müller (Figures
13-14), Dole (Figures 15-16) and Dove (second advertisement, Figures 17-18).




                                    Figures 13-14. Müller.9

In the Müller advertisement, the main character is a woman dressed like a Greek
handmaid, who is tasting a new fat-free Greek yogurt. At the beginning of the
advertisement, she can be seen full-body (Figure 13), but then the focus is
redirected to her face and lips, thus relating this close-up to the moment in which
she tastes her yogurt to the full. This tasting experience is accompanied by a
relatively short sentence, describing the new product and its characteristics
through a female voice. It is interesting to note the Müller-Mmm alliteration and,
last but not least, the creative use of the Müller brand for coining a new adjective,
i.e. Müllerlicious (a fusion of “Müller” and “delicious”). Hence, the unique visual
tasting experience is also fulfilled through the creative use of ELF:

       Table 10. Lexico-grammatical realization of Martin and Rose’s (2003)
Affect-Judgement-Appreciation relationship in Müller advertisement.
               Woman        Müllerlight Greek Style Luscious Lemon,
                            Mmmmh…. 0% added sugar and still...
                            FAT-FREE! Now that's Mmm...Müllerlicious


In the following frames taken from a Dole advertisement (Figures 15-16), we can
see a woman and a man talking about their own family issues in front of a
camera. Here the role of the woman is being stigmatized, as can be seen in the
frame on the right, where she sadly explains how the couple deals with tensions
in the family context during the pandemic (“Quaran-Tensions” is a wordplay in
this regard) and her husband sitting next to her is actually looking at her, thus
confirming what Goffman (1976) refers to as the ritual of subordination, visually
blaming the woman for what happens.




9
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzToh_ypVA (last accessed 20 July 2021)
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                                     Figures 15-16. Dole.10

The transcription of the advertisement confirms the subordinate role of the
woman, who takes on responsibility for the family issues (by using the first-
person plural pronoun we) and arguments (Times are stressful, but we are trying
not to swear in front of the kids), with the man only acknowledging it by means
of the exclamation “Aaaah! Fruit bowl!”. It is interesting to note how “Fruit
Bowl” becomes the preferred substitute for swear words in front of the kids
(Guys, what the Fruit Bowl!).

       Table 11. Lexico-grammatical realization of Martin and Rose’s (2003)
Affect-Judgement-Appreciation relationship in Dole advertisement.
     Woman      Times are stressful. But we’re trying not to swear in front of the
                kids.
     Man        Ahhh
     Woman      So, we use ‘Fruit Bowl’ instead
     Man        Fruit Bowl!
     Woman      Guys! What the Fruit Bowl! What?! We eat a lot of Fruit Bowls.


Also the second Dove advertisement (Figures 17-18) seems to stigmatize the role
of women as the only people suffering from physical and mental illnesses, as can
be seen from the close-ups of body parts whose selection is represented below:




                                   Figures 17-18. Dove (2).11

10
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KogKRO9CAlk (last accessed 2 August 2021)
11
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjXvli8Hbe0 (last accessed 1 August 2021)
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The frames provided above clearly explain the correlation between physical
illnesses and the lack of acceptance of one’s own body: the two frames provided
above are incorporated into Instagram posts with likes and comments, which
emphasize even more a stereotyped conception of beauty based upon physical
appearance. More specifically, the second frame shows a young woman who is
dissatisfied with her skin imperfections and thus compares her current status
with an old Instagram picture in which she has put on some make-up and
definitely looks more attractive. The transcription which is associated with this
advertisement is a concise message uttered by a woman inviting people to
evaluate the results of using the new Dove mousse. The announcer-audience
relationship is rendered by the use of the second-person personal pronoun you,
which represents a shift from the visual representation of the Instagram woman
to the reality of ‘common’ women wishing to get control of their own tan.

       Table 12. Lexico-grammatical realization of Martin and Rose’s (2003)
Affect-Judgement-Appreciation relationship in second Dove advertisement.
    Woman              Get control of your tan. Introducing Dove Lightweight Fast
                       absorbing mousse. That lets you choose the level of your
                       tan. New Dove gradual self-tan body mousse.


Decorative roles (n=64) refer to those contexts in which the woman is being
exploited as an ornament or her presence is used as a persuasive strategy for
inviting people to buy a given product.
     As the purpose of the paper is also to investigate multimodal gender
representation from an interlinguistic perspective, it is well worth providing
some insights into the Italian section of the WOM-AD in order to describe
different female representations and how stereotyped representations are more
frequent in either the Italian or the British section. As already stated earlier in
Section 4, the heterogeneous nature of the dataset did not allow us to carry out
the same multimodal analysis for both sub-sections of the corpus. However, some
conclusions can still be drawn. The following table summarizes the results for
the Italian section of the corpus, again drawing on Plakoyiannaki and Zotos
(2009):

    Table 13. Female role percentages in WOM-AD corpus (IT) according to
Plakoyiannaki and Zotos (2009).
                 Female role percentages in the WOM-AD corpus (it)
                                                n                  (%)
   Traditional roles                           66                  53.2
   Decorative roles                            22                  17.7
   Non-traditional roles                       26                   21
   Equal roles                                 10                   8.1
   Total                                       124                 100


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In the Italian section of the WOM-AD, women predominantly perform traditional
roles, with 53.2% of the analyzed advertisements, in which they appear as
mothers preparing lunch and/or dinner, looking after their children, taking care
of daily cleaning tasks and in professional contexts. They are mainly represented
as maintainers of the domestic order, confirming a female representation
strongly linked to the stereotype of the woman-mother and the woman-wife, as
can be seen in the following frames (Figure 20, frames 1-5):




 Figure 20. Frames 1-5: Woman in traditional roles: Ace; Dentix; Bakery; Seed bread; Vileda.12

Women in traditional roles are generally portrayed first in full, then the focus is
redirected to their hands that knead or cut fruit and vegetables. In this context,
brown-haired women prevail over blonde women, with generally casual clothes,
except for the woman in a professional setting who wears a white coat. As can
be seen from the selection of frames 1-5 above, the woman is generally
represented indoors and at home (frames 1, 4, 5) or in the garden of her own
house in the countryside (frame 3). In all of the frames, the woman is represented
in the background, and this becomes even more evident in frame 1, where in
front of the woman there are sweaters washed and folded systematically, with
the emphasis on the amount of work for which the woman is responsible on a

12
   These advertisements are included in the corpus which was annotated for the CORECOM-
funded research project focusing on the image of women in Apulian advertisements (see
Introduction).
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daily basis, as well as in frame 2, where the doctor in the foreground explains
the antibacterial action of the advertised toothpaste, while the woman in the
background is observing passively and with a low gaze, thus confirming the
Goffmanian function of ranking, which sees the man as the holder of knowledge
and responsible for prestigious tasks as opposed to women, who are perennially
destined to live in a condition of subordination.


5. Conclusions

The analysis of the WOM-AD corpus has provided data on the representation of
the image of women in advertising from an interlinguistic and multimodal
perspective and has demonstrated that discursive constructions of stereotyped
and discriminating gender identities in the Italian and English advertisements
appear to be rather diversified. Specifically, the findings reveal that female roles
characterizing the Italian section of the corpus are represented in a more
traditional way than in the English section (53.2% vs 23.8%). However, this
outcome does not coincide with the percentage of the representation of
decorative roles which should be generally aligned with traditional
representations of women. In fact, decorative roles in the Italian corpus are
unexpectedly less recurrent than in the English one (17.7% vs 23.4%), thus
opening the door to different interpretations of the findings. One possible
interpretation could be related to the prevalence of cosmetics/body care
products in the English section of the corpus (25%), in which the woman is at
the center of advertising but displays a marginal role (namely decorative).
Another, perhaps more interesting hypothesis emerges if we have a look at the
different findings for the distribution of female (co-)presence in the WOM-
AD(EN) corpus: women are in fact represented alone in the English sub-section
of the corpus (46.6%), whereas man-woman co-presence is very low (13.4%),
and men are never represented alone. This perfectly matches with the idea of an
overall prevailing non-traditional representation of the woman in the English
subsection of the corpus in comparison to the Italian one (21%) and, most of all,
with the promotion of women as empowered human beings within society.
     Taking a closer look at non-traditional roles, the research findings show that
in the English advertisements they are more present (37.8 vs 21%), as well as in
the portrayal of equal roles (15% vs 8.1%), thus helping to predict a more
respectful representation of gender roles and of the female body. Furthermore,
the scant presence of gender stereotypes and sexualization of the female body in
the English corpus is also highlighted by such pragma-linguistic patterns as
emotional lexis, appraisal categories and devices which appeal to the audience’s
attention. Crucially, a sense of female empowerment and autonomy, as well as
ease, is conveyed by the frequent use of first-person pronouns along with some
hedging strategies which seem to reinforce the female protagonist’s voice and
role in the exchanges with her interlocutor. Among them, one finds the use of
affect markers (i.e. superlatives, evaluative and attitudinal lexis) and of assertive
and modal verbs expressing the female protagonist’s confidence and intention to
act as she strives for and against prescribed models. Though not exclusively

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related to the textual representation of gender stereotypes, it is worth mentioning
here that the English corpus also reports some challenging examples of linguistic
creativity characterizing ELF in advertising. In particular, the Müller
advertisement provides an attractive visual experience fulfilled through the
creative fusion of “Müller” and “delicious” that creates Müllerlicious. Similarly,
linguistic creativity is also displayed by the Dole advertisement which resorts to
the wordplay “Quaran-Tensions” by envisioning a potential ritual of
subordination in the way the husband visually blames the woman for some
family tensions.
     Finally, this study has focused on women’s representation in advertisements,
and on how they are depicted in terms of language and images. However, for
future investigation it would be interesting to draw on other challenging data
from the results of the whole WOM-AD corpus and to identify ‘men’ as an
analytic variable, comparing how men and women are represented in print and
visual advertisements in linguistic and visual terms as compared to women, as
well as androgynous, non-binary gender portrayals that attempt to address the
Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) segment of consumers. These
thematic paths may present a new, challenging and virtually unexplored
territory for the investigation of gender stereotypes that would surely yield
interesting insights.


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