Move Analysis Of Chinese Dating Ads

Dating ad is a kind of advertisement about a person that he or she puts in a newspaper, magazine or website etc in order to meet a romantic partner. As a special kind of advertisement, its most direct purpose is to arouse the "ideal" reader's attention to the advertiser, which can motivate the readers to take actions to contact the advertiser.Researches on dating ads in the past mainly focused on lexical and syntactical level. Few researchers have analyzed advertisements by using move analysis framework. This study attempts to adopt Swales and Bhatia's frameworks of move analysis to carry out a diachronic study of Chinese dating advertisements to explore the changes of Chinese dating ads.The present study aims to address the following questions:1) Are dating ads a genre? And what are the communicative purposes of this genre? 2) What are the move structures of Chinese dating ads? What are the steps of each move? 3) What are the similarities and differences of structure patterns of Chinese dating ads in different periods? 4) What are the key moves of Chinese dating ads? 5) What are the differences of the contents of each move in different periods? 6) What are the underlying social factors of the differences? This study carries out a quantitive and qualitive study on Chinese dating ads based on the corpus of 150 dating ads in Family from 1980s to 2000s.The actual analyzing process can be divided into four steps. The author first listed the move structures of each ad in the corpus based on move analysis theory and then compared the structure patterns of different periods. After that, the contents of each move were analyzed in detail. Finally, the author tried to explore the reasons for the differences. Results of the research show that in terms of the frequency of moves, Move 2, Move 3, Move 4 and Move 5 are the key moves of Chinese dating ads. And as far as patterns of move structures are concerned, more advertisers began to use individualized language to catch eyeballs of counterparts with the development of society. Move 2 always occupies the most words in the three periods. In addition, the contents of some moves and their sub-steps varied in different periods. The author also tried to explore the reasons contributing to the changes from sociological point of view.