O gênero anúncio eletrônico pessoal e as escolhas de seus anunciantes: uma análise do posicionamento atitudinal de gays e heterossexuais na internet

Abstract

The present work lies on the borderline of cultural and linguistic studies. It aims at examining whether there are differences concerning genre organization and lexical choices in ads filled in by gay and heterosexual males. The corpus consists of forty ads from two dating sites on the internet: twenty are originally written by gay males and the other twenty are written by heterosexual males. This research draws on works such as Swales (1990) and Bhatia s (1993) on genre description and on Hoey s (1997) on erotic narratives. From the latter we have borrowed a few key concepts to help us analyze self and other description. At an early stage, the internet ads are compared to printed ads (cf. Shalom 1997) in an attempt to check how these ads should have adapted to the digital medium. Afterwards, we resort to Martin and White s (2005) Appraisal system so as to characterize how gays and heterosexuals see themselves and their desired others. The dissertation suggests that there are differences related to the attitudinal positioning of gays and heterosexuals, particularly in the use of Affect. There are also findings unforeseen at the beginning of the research. In other words, these differences do not come down either to the variation in the organization of the sites, or to the lexical choices of the advertisers, but rather to the kind of site chosen by the advertisers