English Adjectives in Indonesian Cosmetic Advertisement: A Study of Emphatic Personal Metadiscourse Markers

Abstract

The growth of the globalization of brands in international markets has led to the inevitable importance of advertisement and hence to scholarship on advertisement, such as with methods of metadiscourse. This descriptive qualitative study was aimed at determining interpersonal metadiscourse markers used in eight advertisements of Indonesian cosmetic products using English in the construction of beauty within contemporary Indonesian contexts. The results evidence an emerging new terminology in defining and classifying the types of beauty as a social construct presented in product advertisements. Employing a discourse analysis and Hylans’s emphatic personal metadiscourse marker adjectives, it was found that the advertising makers have used adjectives to describe nouns in the advertising texts due to their persuasive meanings, namely those of aesthetic adjectives. The adjectives found in the data belong to several categories, i.e. evaluativity, dimensionality (unidimensional and multidimensional), and measurability. All of these adjectives have constructed the concept of green beauty, healthy beauty, modern beauty, religious beauty and aesthetic beauty. This study is expected to contribute to the development of language and media studies, and to enrich media studies, especially those that can enhance the strategies used by advertising agencies to choose the most effective kind of language in their advertisements.