Connotations and Gender in Ads

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,7, Technical University of Braunschweig (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this paper, I want to point out the characteristics of connotation and denotation and their relation to advertising. First, I will concentrate on connotation. I want to work out the structure and the way it is used and then go into its role in advertising. The chapter about denotation is supposed to give an overview of denotation. Just like the part about connotation I want to point out what the term denotation means and the usage of it. After that, I want to compare both aspects in an extra chapter. The last part of this chapter then illustrates the differences of connotation and denotation to make clear in what way they are related. Chapter number three then is related to the topic of Gender in Advertising. First, I will give a general overview about the topic and analytic possibilities. Later I will go on with the topic of women and men in advertising. In chapter number four, I will come up with the hypothesis that women and men have different connotations to specific terms or advertisings. To achieve that I made two different polls, whose results are presented here. The aim of those polls is to clear if there are any differences in the connotations of each sex to simple words. Later I will go on with a poll I carried out with several male test subjects. This poll was done with printed adverts and its objective is to answer the question if men are able to assign ads to the right target group and what they associate with the respective advertisements. Another important and interesting question that I want to answer in chapter 4.2. is if men tend to feel adverts as sexistic or not.