The Semiotic Study of Advertisement of Billboards in Tehran based on Gender (Incorporating Text and Image)

Advertisement is a thinkable subject to various fields of study such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics and criticism. In the visual advertising texts, at least two systems work together, the language system and visual one, to form the layers of text. The purpose of this research is to increase the knowledge of people and change their attitudes to communications and advertisements and finally to change the style of social life of them through the change in the content of text and image in the advertisement of billboards in Tehran. In addition, this research attempts to present the linguistic and non-linguistic factors in the advertisement and to use the theoretical achievements of discourse and pragmatic factors for making advertisement that is more useful for commercial institutes. It is worth mentioning here that the authors fulfill this research by collecting data through field research, interviews and questionnaires, and the authors used descriptive-analytic method to analyze the results. In addition, a body of two hundred participants, including one hundred for each sex, who responded to qualitative questionnaire, implemented this research. Moreover, the authors attempt to indicate that billboards in Tehran aim to affect and change the addresses' attitude in the direction of persuasion of them to buy the commercial products. This goal is achieved by using linguistic factors such as: text, the structure of text in terms of different types of its' chosen sentences, pragmatic factors like language roles and presuppositions, semiotic factors like linguistic signs, advertising signs and linguistic conventions.