The Discourse of Advertising for Luxury Residences in Hong Kong: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

This chapter documents the operation of multimodal strategies in the discursive construction of social actors, social actions and legitimations in luxury property advertising discourse, with a focus on the interplay between verbal and visual modes. It describes how advertising discourse exploits the inclusion of Caucasian models and their depiction as a culturally homogeneous group endowed with hedonistic, opulent lifestyle identities through their social actions in order to market a luxury residence. It is argued that legitimations are put in place to enhance the persuasive power of the advertising discourse, with particular reference to the symbolic values of luxury products in general, the rationalisation of knowledges of habitual social actions, and the narratives that target recipients of the ads who are hailed as intellectual buyers. It is hoped that the analysis demonstrates that such ideologies are very effectively studied through their multimodal realisations, where the visual mode, in particular, can draw on and reproduce stereotyped representations.