A Contrasted Analysis Of Mood And Modality In English And Chinese Public Service Advertisements

Public service advertisement (PSA) is a sub-branch of non-commercial advertising, and it refers to the use of commercial advertising techniques for non-commercial purposes to serve the public interests, which will promote the public to change their attitudes and behavior. Nowadays, the majority of the studies focus on commercial ads, but few on PSA, especially from systemic- functional grammar (SFG) perspective. Therefore, this thesis explores how PSA realize interpersonal meaning by mood and modality system.Being both Chinese speakers and English researchers, we should base on our native language, as well as to explore English discourse. Therefore, this essay focuses on the contrastive study between English and Chinese PSA based on SFG. We not only do the contrast analysis, but also provide some simple reasons about it.Both English and Chinese 100 PSA are collected from radio broadcasts, TV stations, magazines, newspapers, publishers, advertising billboards and the internet. Since there are many aspects of PSA, this essay will pick up the words of PSA to study. The thesis carries out descriptive analysis of mood and modality of each sample and does the contrastive analysis. Besides that, it also explores how PSA establish the relationship between the advertiser and the audience.It is found that declaratives, which are used to give information and command occasionally, take up an overwhelming part in both English and Chinese PSA. Interrogatives and imperatives make the discourse more interactive. Chinese PSA apply more imperatives, which indicates the unequal power between the advertiser and the audience. Some mood resources are only found in Chinese data, such as disjunctive questions and inquiry questions without question words.The study of modality reveals that the modal expressions of modalisation occupy more than a half of all the modal expression in both English and Chinese PSA. That indicates that although PSA aims to tell the public what they are expected to do or to arouse the same sympathy of the audience, more and more PSA incline to get rid of the tone of sermon instead of giving information. In the study on modulation, Chinese PSA applies much more modal expressions of obligation than English PSA does, which implies that the purpose of PSA is to tell the public to take some actions; on the other, advertisers in China have greater power over the public. However, English PSA uses more expressions of inclination, which shows the equal status between the advertiser and the audience so as to achieve the goal of persuasion.