THE Semiological Study of Advertisement

---With Women Representation in the Center---

Nam Mi Jeong (The Graduate School of Korea University Thesis Supervisor: Ph.D. Kim Seung Hyun Department of Journalism and Mass Communication.)

In this thesis, 1 examined the ideological side of advertisement with woman representation in the center by adopting a semiological approach. It presupposes two facts and they are as follows.

First, advertisement in those days is regarded as not a passive transmitter but an active mediator and makes its appearance as an ideological apparatus whose function is to reproduce the culture of a dominant order.

Secondly most of advertisement transmits not so much the information of goods as the appealing value or image, and so is exhibited in connection with gender identity which is one of the most important values in social conducts and cultural products.

In this place, woman is used so a useful material regardless of the attribute of goods. The appearance of woman represented in advertisements reinforces or distorts the dominant relation of sender in the real word.

For the purpose of analysis, I selected woman-centered advertisements as samples from a woman magazine, LADY KYUNG HYANG dn the odd months in 1990 and analyzed them for hidden meaning by using a semiological method.

As a consequence of this study, male chauvinism and consumption centered ideologies were found to be predominant in advertisements. They are related reciprocally and function as natural as well as normal by means of the fashion of peculiar meaning construction.

The study of signs and the way theywork is called semiotics or semiology. Semiotics focuses its attention primarily on the text.

A sign consists of a signifier and a signified. The farmer is the sign's image as we perceive it, the latter is the mental concept to which it refers.

The advertisement shown a view Point of semiology gets an interpretive object which is the constructive form that various signs conjoin purposely to furnish goods with symbolic values.