Abstract
This chapter documents the operation of multimodal strategies in the discursive construction of social actors, social actions and legitimations in luxury property advertising discourse, with a focus on the interplay between verbal and visual modes. It describes how advertising discourse exploits the inclusion of Caucasian models and their depiction as a culturally homogeneous group endowed with hedonistic, opulent lifestyle identities through their social actions in order to market a luxury residence. It is argued that legitimations are put in place to enhance the persuasive power of the advertising discourse, with particular reference to the symbolic values of luxury products in general, the rationalisation of knowledges of habitual social actions, and the narratives that target recipients of the ads who are hailed as intellectual buyers. It is hoped that the analysis demonstrates that such ideologies are very effectively studied through their multimodal realisations, where the visual mode, in particular, can draw on and reproduce stereotyped representations.
Keywords
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Owing to the influx of mainlanders from China after the handover from British rule, ordinary citizens in Hong Kong have reportedly been suffering when mainlanders buy up almost a quarter of Hong Kong homes (Chugani 2012; Zhang 2012), and their ‘anti-mainland’ sentiments hit one peak after another, with the massive protests against the introduction of national education classes being one of the latest examples of the cultural, social and political gap that exists between Hong Kong and its mainland masters (Liu 2012; see also Lowe and Tsang 2017). Considering the complex political factors and the population mix of mainland and Hong Kong Chinese, there has been a growing awareness of ‘Hong Kong Man’ (cf. Baker 1983); those locally-born, locally-educated young professionals in Hong Kong increasingly consider themselves Heunggongyan or Hongkongese.
- 2.
Gender roles have been the focus of Goffman’s (1979) monograph on display advertisements. He found that men and women were repeatedly depicted as participants in ‘hyper-ritualisations’ of social scenes. That is, commercial advertisements distilled everyday social rituals into scenes, the common denominator of which was ‘female subordination’. Kang (2008) is arguably the first study which takes up the issue of gender stereotypes in TV commercials about luxury residences in Hong Kong.
- 3.
What in Fig. 5.5b is generalised (‘partying’), for instance, can be broken down into several more specific actions (‘sending out invitations’, ‘receiving replies’, ‘arranging catering’). Similarly, what in Fig. 5.5g is generalised (‘sailing’), for example, can be broken down into several more specific actions (‘buying a yacht’, ‘hiring a captain’, ‘checking weather before setting out with friends’).
References
Baker, Hugh. 1983. Life in the cities: The emergence of Hong Kong Man. The China Quarterly 95 (Sep.): 467–479.
Baldry, Anthony. 2005. A multimodal approach to text studies in English: The role of MCA in multimodal concordancing and multimodal corpus linguistics. Campobasso: Palladino Editore.
Baldry, Anthony, and Paul Thibault. 2006. Multimodal transcription and text analysis: A multimedia toolkit and coursebook with associated on-line course. London: Equinox.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image-music-text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana.
Basil, Michael. 1996. Identification as mediator of celebrity effects. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 40 (4): 478–495.
Berger, John. 1973. Ways of seeing. New York: Viking Press.
Bernstein, David. 1974. Creative advertising. London: Longman.
Berthon, Pierre, Leyland Pitt, Michael Parent, and Jean-Paul Berthon. 2009. Aesthetics and ephemerality: Observing and preserving the luxury brand. California Management Review 52 (1): 45–66.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chan, Kam Wah. 2000. Prosperity or inequality: Deconstructing the myth of home ownership in Hong Kong. Housing Studies 15 (1): 29–44.
Chaney, David. 1996. Lifestyles. London and New York: Routledge.
Cheung, Sidney, and Cheung Ma. 2005. Advertising modernity: Home, space and privacy. Visual Anthropology 18 (1): 65–80.
Chugani, Michael. 2012. Hong Kong’s fear of ‘mainlandisation’ stems from everyday frustration. South China Morning Post, 11 October.
Cook, Guy. 2001. The discourse of advertising. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Djonov, Emilia, and Sumin Zhao, eds. 2014. Critical multimodal studies of popular discourse. London and New York: Routledge.
Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman.
———. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———. 1995. Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. London: Longman.
———. 2003. Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2007. Introduction. In Discourse and contemporary social change, ed. Norman Fairclough, Giuseppina Cortese, and Patrizia Ardizzone, 9–21. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Fairclough, Norman, Giuseppina Cortese, and Patrizia Ardizzone, eds. 2007. Discourse and contemporary social change. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Fleming, David, & Harrison, Simon. 2018. Selling (un)real estate with “Shi(势)-nema”: Manipulation, not persuasion, in China’s contemporary cinematic-cities. Social Semiotics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1526856.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. In Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
———. 1986. Disciplinary power and subjection. In Power, ed. Steven Lukes, 229–242. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goffman, Erving. 1979. Gender advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harris, Zellig. 1952. Discourse analysis. Language 28 (1): 1–30.
Hiramoto, Mie, and Cherise Shi Ling Teo. 2015. Heteronormative love makes a house a home: Multimodal analysis of luxury housing ads in Singapore. Journal of Language and Sexuality 4 (2): 223–253.
Howers, David, ed. 1996. Cross-cultural consumption: Global markets, local realities. London and New York: Routledge.
Jaworski, Adam, and Crispin Thurlow. 2009. Taking an elitist stance: Ideology and the discursive production of social distinction. In Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives, ed. Alexandra Jaffe, 195–226. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2017. Mediatising the “super-rich,” normalising privilege. Social Semiotics 27 (3): 276–287.
Jaworski, Adam, and Simone Yeung. 2010. Life in the Garden of Eden: The naming and imagery of residential Hong Kong. In Linguistic landscape in the city, ed. Elana Goldberg Shohamy and Monica Barni, 153–181. Clevedon, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
Jewitt, Carey., ed. 2009. The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Jewitt, Carey, Jeff Bezemer, and Kay O’Halloran. 2016. Introducing multimodality. London and New York: Routledge.
Kang, Agnes. 2008. At the intersection of elitism and gender in Hong Kong: Advertisements of luxury residences. In Proceedings of the 5th biannual International Gender and Language Association conference (IGALA 5), ed. Julia de Bres, Janet Holmes, and Meredith Marra, 97–106. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University of Wellington.
Kapferer, Jean-Noël, and Vincent Bastien. 2009. The specificity of luxury management: Turning marketing upside down. Brand Management 16 (5/6): 311–322.
Keller, Kevin Lane. 2003. Brand synthesis: The multidimensionality of brand knowledge. Journal of Consumer Research 29 (4): 595–600.
Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London and New York: Routledge.
Kress, Gunther, and Carey Jewitt, eds. 2003. Multimodal literacy. New York: Peter Lang.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Edward Arnold.
———. 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Leonard, Peter. 1997. Postmodern welfare: Reconstructing an emancipatory project. London: Sage.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967. The scope of anthropology. Translated by Sherry Ortner Paul and Robert Paul. London: Jonathan Cape.
Liu, Juliana. 2012. Hong Kong debates ‘national education’ classes. BBC News Hong Kong, 1 September. Accessed October 4, 2018. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-19407425.
Lowe, John, and Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang. 2017. Disunited in ethnicity: The racialisation of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong. Patterns of Prejudice 51 (2): 137–158.
Machin, David, and Joanna Thornborrow. 2003. Branding and discourse: The case of Cosmopolitan. Discourse & Society 14 (4): 453–471.
———. 2006. Lifestyle and the depoliticisation of agency: Sex as power in women’s magazines. Social Semiotics 16 (1): 173–188.
Machin, David, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2003. Global schemes and local discourses in Cosmopolitan. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 493–512.
———. 2005. Lifestyle and language style: The case of a global magazine. Media, Culture & Society 27 (4): 577–600.
———. 2007. Global media discourse: A critical introduction. London and New York: Routledge.
O’Halloran, Kay. 2004. Visual semiosis in film. In Multimodal discourse analysis: Systemic functional perspectives, ed. Kay O’Halloran, 109–131. London: Continuum.
Park, Whan, Bernard Jaworski, and Deborah MacInnis. 1986. Strategic brand concept-image management. Journal of Marketing 50 (Oct.): 621–635.
Rooney, Nuala. 2001. Making house into home: Interior design in Hong Kong. In Consuming Hong Kong, ed. Gordon Matthews and Lui Tai-lok, 47–79. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Saunders, Peter. 1990. A nation of home owners. London: Unwin Hyman.
Thibault, Paul. 2000. The multimodal transcription of a television advertisement: Theory and practice. In Multimodality and multimediality in the distance learning age, ed. Anthony Baldry, 311–385. Campobasso: Palladino Editore.
Tomlinson, John. 1991. Cultural imperialism: A critical introduction. London: Pinter Publishers.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 1995. Representing social actions. Discourse & Society 6 (1): 81–106.
———. 1996. The representation of social actors. In Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis, ed. Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard, 32–70. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2000a. The construction of purpose in discourse. In Discourse and social life, ed. Srikant Sarangi and Malcolm Coulthard, 66–82. London: Longman.
———. 2000b. Visual racism. In The semiotics of racism: Approaches in critical discourse analysis, ed. Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, 330–350. Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
———. 2005a. Introducing social semiotics. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2005b. Time in discourse. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 1 (1): 125–145.
———. 2007. Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse & Communication 1 (1): 91–112.
———. 2008. Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2011. The language of colour: An introduction. London and New York: Routledge.
Vickers, Jonathan, and Franck Renand. 2003. The marketing of luxury goods: An exploratory study—Three conceptual dimensions. The Marketing Review 3 (4): 459–478.
Vinikas, Vincent. 1992. Soft soaps, hard sell: American hygiene in an age of advertisement. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press.
Williamson, Judith. 1978. Decoding advertisements. London: Merion Boyars.
Zhang, April. 2012. Hong Kong identity caught between political reality and insecurity. South China Morning Post, 17 October.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wong, M. (2019). The Discourse of Advertising for Luxury Residences in Hong Kong: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. In: Multimodal Communication. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15428-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15428-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15427-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15428-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)