Maleand
FemaleAds: Gender Expression in the Language of Recent Polish and Russian Advertising
The spread of consumerism in the markets of Eastern Europe and the
Former Soviet Union during the last decade of transition to
post-socialism has brought commercial advertising to a new Slavic
context. As a culture-sensitive discourse genre that both reflects and
shapes socio-cultural perceptions, commercial advertising presents
Slavists with a relatively unexplored corpus of new texts for
linguistic, literary, and cultural analysis with real-world
implications. This paper will expand on gender-linguistic studies of
Polish and Russian to explore whether such formal characteristics as
grammatical gender and agreement phenomena, genderlect and male/female
lexicon in the language of advertising shape perceptions of real-world
gender and contribute to the creation of male
and
female
advertisements. Jaworski 1986 (ideal,
or target, consumer and transferred to the
current concern of the reader-consumer who will identify with that
proposition.
Drawing from a corpus of over five hundred advertisements taken
from recent general-interest media in Poland and Russia, I will
present evidence from fieldwork just completed in Moscow and
Kraków that shows whether native Polish and Russian informants
identify certain advertisements as being male
or
female
by means of linguistic cues. Based on my work
with informants, I will identify which linguistic elements are
operational in conveying the perception of real-world gender. On the
basis of fieldwork results, I will present the case that assumptions
made about the gender of the ideal consumer influence the form of the
advertising text. Furthermore, there may be an implicational
relationship between the advertiser's imposition of an awareness of
gender into the current concern of the reader-consumer and the degree
of formality encoded in the advertising text. Yokoyama 1993 has
suggested that Russian speakers typically allow themselves to express
awareness of personal features, such as gender, only in the informal
language of the