Gender stereotypes in advertising discourse (based on materials of the English language)

The article deals with the problem of gender stereotypes in English advertising discourse. Gender is presented as a social construct, which is supported by public institutions and cultural traditions. The basic trends of advertising discourse in line with gender stereotypes of modern English-language advertising have been revealed. One of the most effective methods for the analysis of gender paradigm in the language is associative experiment, which allows us to establish a link between the meaning of a word and its semantic content within the specific culture. We have analyzed the results of associative experiment among native speakers: determined the peculiarities of gender stereotypes - both negative and positive, and classified respondents’ answers. The experiment has shown that image of women in the English’s social consciousness changes towards the leveling of boundaries between masculine and feminine.