A Contrastive Analysis Of Interpersonal Function Between Chinese And English Advertisements

Interpersonal function means that people use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behaviors, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world.Among the three meta-functions of Functional Grammar, the studies on ideational and textual functions are quite common while researches on interpersonal function are relatively fewer. But as the most noticeable indicator of the relationship between language and society, interpersonal meaning is worth profound study.Besides mood, modality and key——the three major embodiments of interpersonalmeaning, Halliday also mentioned some other components that can realize interpersonal meaning such as person system, attitudinal type of Epithet, connotative meanings of lexical items and voice quality.Recently, there has been a popular trend to study the interpersonal meaning of different discourses. However, these studies are mostly based on English discourses while researches on Chinese discourses are very rare.This paper just intends to find out the similarities as well as differences of interpersonal meaning between Chinese and English. The thesis uses a very functionaltype of discourse——advertisements——as language material. After carefulanalyses and comparisons in such three aspects as mood, modality and person system, the similarities and disparities are summarized. Furthermore, the reasons behind are preliminarily explored. The target is to improve our ability to appreciate advertisements and to create more and more outstanding ads.