The miracle of youth: a linguistic analysis of samples of advertising discourse from the anti-ageing industry

Authors

  • Sílvia Barbosa NOVA/FCSH e CLUNL
  • Mariana Silva Ninitas Universidade Aberta

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26334/2183-9077/rapln8ano2021a3

Keywords:

face threatening acts, ethos, ageing, beauty brands, advertising

Abstract

 In this work, we aim to analyze how the cosmetic industry communicates the idea of aging and how it offers solutions for reversing this natural process, in the advertising speeches about face creams, aimed at the female audience. We built a corpus of 112 texts on cosmetic products, collected in beauty catalogs, websites of beauty brands and retail chains in the perfumery and cosmetics market, which have a set of texts in European Portuguese on the theme of “aging”. From a perspective of Lexical-Semantic analysis with contributions of the Discourse Analysis Pragmatics we tried to identify linguistic patterns to understand which discursive strategies were manipulated when advertising products promise to reverse the natural aging process. We observed that brands have products where the name is not always self-explanatory of the function it proposes and without great commitment to the possible solution, as aging and the respective physical marks are understood as the result of a process that the skin suffered and not the person.

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Published

2021-10-16

How to Cite

Barbosa, S., & Ninitas, M. S. (2021). The miracle of youth: a linguistic analysis of samples of advertising discourse from the anti-ageing industry. Journal of the Portuguese Linguistics Association, (8), 26–39. https://doi.org/10.26334/2183-9077/rapln8ano2021a3

Issue

No. 8 (2021): Journal of the Portuguese Linguistics Association

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Sílvia Barbosa, Mariana Silva Ninitas

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Authors retain copyright and concede to the journal the right of first publication. The articles are simultaneously licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows sharing of the work with an acknowledgement of authorship and initial publication in this journal.
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