A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Advertising English

Advertising plays a key role in business system. There has been an enormous upsurge of interest in the linguistic characteristics of advertising over the last two decades. Introductory book-length treatments of the subject have tended to concentrate on the major levels of language organization in advertisement, including phonology, lexis and syntax, its cognitive features and cultural dimensions. In order to establish a desirable relationship with the audience, the advertiser often tries to lure prospective consumers by employing different linguistic devices, equating advertisements to informal conversation, and exhibiting pervasive trends. All of the above features make the interpersonal meaning of the advertising more complex and they deserve our special attention.Mainly based on the theories of Halliday's systemic functional grammar and those of pragmatics, the thesis analyzes more than one hundred examples to demonstrate how interpersonal meanings are generally realized in print advertising English, especially in headlines, subheads and slogans, which show the characteristics of the text. Through a systemic analysis of linguistic elements on the lexical and the sentential levels, it is found that modal auxiliaries, person markers, non-declaratives, tense, hedges and emphatics are the elements usually used in advertising English to achieve different interpersonal meanings.It is hoped that the study may serve to show how interpersonal meanings are usually realized in advertising English. Besides, it is a kind of challenge to traditional studies of advertising, which pay too much attention to the content and other aspects of advertising. Finally, the author points out that an appropriate choice of the interpersonal elements of a language, such as pronouns, may help an advertiser to turn out a successful advertisement.