Celebrating Motherhood. Multimodal Facework in Mother’s Day Advertisements
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | This chapter delves into the realm of multimodal facework within celebratory advertisements, particularly those challenging the conventional image of a public mother. The study scrutinizes six U.S. audiovisual advertisements published on Mother’s Day (2019-2022). Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory and Pennock-Speck and Del Saz-Rubio (2013) multimodal discourse analysis framework, the study focuses on how semiotic modes, including visual, verbal, and acoustic ones, help the persuadee maintain and challenge the ideal public mother’s face. The study contributes to the body of multimodal facework studies, offering a comprehensive examination of how the individual modes participate in reconstruction of the representation of motherhood in the advertising discourse. The findings accentuate that while the public mother’s positive face can be interpreted as being threatened at the persuader-public mother communication context, this threat helps extend attributes society is invited to associate with motherhood. At the level of the persuader-persuadee interaction, this positive face threat can be interpreted as an attempt to enhance the persuadee’s positive face, because it shows the persuader’s interest in expanding the common ground of issues related to motherhood. This enables the persuader to reshape the portrayal of motherhood’s complexities often overlooked in public discourses. |
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