for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
at The
University of Hong Kong
in January 1998
| The present study attempts to answer the question
'how are the generalized identities of children as perceived by adults
constructed and represented by language and visual images in advertising?'
by applying van Dijk's theory of macrostructures and superstructures, schema
theory, Halliday's Functional Grammar, and semantic role theory and Frame
Semantics to a text-based analysis of 577 Chinese print and television
advertisements collected with the period 1992-1995 in Hong Kong.
11 canonical general propositions for constructing the child are described. Lexical cues which realize each of the 11 general propositions are identified; semantic role configurations associated with the use of the cues are analysed; and the pragmatic and conceptual dimensions in realizing the general propositions are investigated. The special relevance of the 11 general positions to children vis-a-vis adults is shown by considering 'pan-categories' advertisements. With respect textual rhetoric, it is found that the canonical general propositions can be freely deployed irrespective of their relevance to the substantive and corollary topics of an advertisement/ This is formulated as the Periphery Principle. This principle, together with the general propositions themselves, are applied to an analysis of texts outside advertising for the purposes of validation and cross-genre comparison. While they hold in general, lexical, propositional, pragmatic and conceptual means of general proposition realization peculiar to texts on parenting/child care, news stories and everyday Cantonese conversations are discerned. Particularly noteworthy is the provision of a repertoire of general proposition-realizing collocations and the tendency in everyday conversations to use general proposition instantiations which exhibit lexical simplicity (preference for a limited number of single word cues) and propositional semantic simplicity (not specifying certain semantic roles). A cross-genre count of the percentages of textual Evaluation of the Child identity is performed to compare relative tendencies for adults to evaluate children using the canonical general propositions or other specific propositions. It was found that 'soft' news stories and features generally tend to have the highest percentages. The whole analysis has been closely connected to its sociocultural implications. Based on the limited set of canonical general propositions, the flexibility in exploiting them, the Periphery Principle and the aforementioned lexical and propositional semantic simplicity, the study concludes that it is these characteristics of 'adult talk on children' that render adults' conventional perception of children unlikely to change even in the face of increasing social discussions on the betterment of children's life. |