Discours publicitaire des produits cosmétiques : Analyse multimodale du discours anti-âge dans le magazine féminin ELLE (anglais-français)

This paper aims to show how ageing is represented in cosmetics advertising discourse, the purpose of which is to convince and seduce the female consumer. The article is mainly about deciphering the anti-ageing discourse through the analysis of the linguistic features as well as some visual strategies implemented by advertisers to promote the products which help fight the visible signs of ageing. Indeed, the multimodal analysis of the anti-ageing discourse in my French and English corpora, taken from recent issues of ELLE magazine (2020), enabled me to identify the textual and pictorial characteristics that are used by advertisers to convince the consumer that the unwelcome signs of ageing need to be erased. In light of the quantitative data obtained using LancsBox as a linguistic analysis tool, a contrastive study of the language related to the anti-ageing discourse has been established. The close scrutiny of the data has revealed similarities as well as differences in the two sub-corpora. In order to illustrate the bilingual and multimodal study, some examples selected from the corpus will be explored in detail.