“LONGING WON’T BRING HIM BACK SOONER…” A Case Study of Gendered Language Use in American Recruitment Posters from the Second World War

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse and compare American male and female recruitment posters from the Second World War. The sub-aims are to find out whether the slogans directed at men and women differed linguistically from each other, and if men and women were attributed differently. For this, the Genre and Multimodality Model (GeM) is used to analyse each poster. Linguistically, the focus is semantics and pragmatics. The individual results will then be compared using research questions from Reisigl and Wodak (2001). The analysis showed that the way men and women were both addressed and attributed differed in a number of ways. Men were strong and heroic, while women were temporary substitutes for unavailable men.