Appraisal Research Of Cosmetic Advertising

As an effective way for people to get information about a product or a service, advertising plays a more and more important role in the social and economic development. Cosmetic advertising, with its attractive language and beautifying effects, draws many women customers'attention. Previously, scholars and researchers attach more importance to the generic characteristic, text pattern and communicative function of advertising texts. There're fewer people concerning the role of the lexical words with evaluative meaning approaching to the realization of interpersonal function.Huang Guowen (2001) indicates the text pattern of cosmetic advertising that most cosmetic advertising texts belong to"problem-solution"pattern which includes four parts:"situation","problem","solution"and"evaluation", in which"problem"and"solution"are necessary, while"situation"and"evaluation"are optional. Based on this text pattern, the present study is undertaken within the APPRAISAL framework put forward by Martin, analyzing 30 English cosmetic advertising texts from attitudinal perspective. It aims to show the distributive characteristics of evaluative resources in the four parts, and further expose how these resources realize the interaction between the producer & advertiser and the potential customer, and help persuade the customer to buy the product.When classifying advertising texts, we should concern two factors: what is being advertised-a product or a service, and who is being addressed. (Cook 2001) So the evaluative analysis is divided into two parts: one is towards cosmetic product, and the other towards the potential customer. By means of analysis, the present study finds that when cosmetic product is appraised, the evaluations are mainly reflected in the"solution"and"evaluation"parts, and the most frequently applied resources is APPRECIATION; when the potential customer is appraised, the evaluations are mainly reflected in the"situation"and"problem"parts, and the evaluative resources employed include AFFECT, JUDGMENT and APPRECIATION. The reason lies in that only caring about people's daily concern can the advertising arouse people's interest ("situation"and"problem"), then guide them to the process of promoting the cosmetic product ("solution"and"evaluation"), and finally realize the persuasion and interaction.The thesis consists of five chapters: Chapter One is an introduction about what to study, why to study, how to study and the organization of the thesis; Chapter Two is literature review, mainly concerning cosmetic advertising text with relative studies and theoretical foundation of the research-APPRAISAL theory as well as kernel ideas of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar; Chapter Three and Chapter Four make the APPRAISAL analysis respectively from the perspectives of cosmetic product and the potential customer, exposing the distributive characteristics and the reason; Chapter Six concludes the major findings, and the contributions, meanwhile pointing out the limitations of the present study.