Semiotic analysis of women’s images in the publicity of La Paz city

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to show the semiotic meaning of publicity sign with women’s images. To this respect, it analyzes the social representation of women. Considering this, the first phase of the work consists in reviewing a series of models to analyze publicity sign. Then, we also take into account the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic levels of analysis in order to adapt a model of analysis that would permit a comprehensive study. This qualitative research describes and analyzes the main components of a small group of publicities located on the downtown of La Paz city, focusing its attention on the use of women on this linguistic sign. Furthermore, to analyze the problem of genre on publicity, it uses the Social Stereotypes Method developed by E. Garcia and I. Garcia (2004) who provided us several tools to recognize the social representation of woman and to establish its meaning on publicity. Accordingly, Chapter one sets out the background of the problem, the objectives and the justification of the research. Chapter two contains the theoretical background that develops important issues on system of linguistic and non linguistic communication, signifying, codifying and a general theory about Semiotics of publicity sign. Moreover, it reviews specific points of view of different researchers to this respect. Chapter three is divided into three parts. The first part develops the methodology of the work described on the first section, defining the research design, the units of analysis and the instrumentation used to collect the data. The second part introduces a model to analyze the Semiotics of publicity sign which is based on the work of several researchers. The third part focuses on the analysis and the interpretation of each publicity, classifying them according to its shape and typology. The final chapter contains the conclusions and recommendations of this research in which our main conclusion is that the publicity with women’s images in downtown of La Paz city shows that there is a predominance of sexual, beauty and housewife stereotypes, tending to represent the women as a superficial subject; meanwhile, other social stereotypes in which the women play an important role shows a marginal participation.