women?s magazines; parallelism; structural stereotype; macrostructure; microstructure

A stereotype, be it a phenomenon of linguistic structure or a reflection of cognitive schemata, belongs among the key features defining the discourse of lifestyle magazines, and women?s magazines in particular. Drawing upon Tárnyiková?s definition of structural stereotypes and van Dijk?s theory of macrostructures, this study explores stereotypes as the interface of the recurrence of form and meaning, and aims to provide an insight into the interplay between the stereotypes realized on the level of microstructures and the stereotypes on the macrostructural level. The multifunctional nature of stereotypes includes their role in the mechanisms of textual cohesion as well as in the cognitive processes of reflecting existing scripts or schemata and developing new ones. Due to its multidimensionality, stereotyping serves as an effective communication strategy.