A Study On The Cohesive Devices In English Print Advertising Discourse

Advertising,as an important vehicle to disseminate information,plays an important role in daily life. And the language of advertising in its long-term development has formed its own unique style and characteristics, which has aroused the interests of linguists domestic and abroad to study the language of advertisements from different linguistic perspectives.This thesis is mainly based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion and coherence theory of the systematic-functional grammar to analyze and discuss how the aspects of the non-structural cohesion, say grammatical and lexical cohesions, are applied in the print advertising discourse to achieve the coherence effects in order to accomplish the purpose of selling products and services.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction. Chapter 2 introduces the background knowledge of the advertisement, briefly reviews the previous studies on advertising language, and highlights the focus of this thesis—a study on the cohesive devices in advertising discourse. Chapter 3 expounds Halliday and Hassan's cohesion and coherence theory which is the theoretical foundation of the present thesis. Chapter 4 is the main body of the thesis, which first describes purpose of the study, data collection and analysis procedure, and then analyzes the features and distribution of the grammatical and lexical cohesion in advertising discourse. Chapter 5 is the major findings. Chapter 6 is the conclusion.After the detailed analysis of commercial consumer ads, it is found that advertising discourse does have its own cohesive features. And the characteristics of cohesion in advertising discourse are illustrated in the following. Firstly, in grammatical cohesion, reference, ellipsis and conjunction relation are more used than other types. As for reference, the number of exophoric references is much larger than that of endophoric ones. And the first and the second personal references are most frequently adopted. What's more, the frequency of demonstrative reference is also high. When it comes to Ellipsis, clausal ellipsis tops first. In conjunction relation, additive is widely applied. Secondly, as far as lexical cohesion is concerned, reiteration is more frequently used in the advertisements, in which reiteration of the same words takes a large proportion, presenting a cohesive feature which is different from other genres.The analysis of the various cohesive devices in advertising discourse can be of great significance both for the readers to understand advertisements clearly, and for the advertising companies to be more conscious of using cohesive devices to refine their advertisements.