| The present thesis attempts to explore interpersonal meaning in job advertisements and dating advertisements from the perspective of SFL. Both job advertisements and dating advertisements share the common characteristics of advertising: providing and transmitting information, as they belong to the persuasive genre, but job advertisements aim at establishing a good rapport between advertisers and the applicants and make them apply, while dating advertisements try to attract appropriate people for those singles who expect to date and further achieve the aim of marriage. The two above-mentioned functions fall within the scope of interpersonal meaning. Interpersonal meaning refers to the strand of meaning produced when we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs (Halliday, 1994). In the classical framework of SFL, Halliday proposes that mood and modality are two vital devices to realize interpersonal meaning lexico-grammatically, on the basis of which J. R. Martin develops the appraisal system. Despite the importance of job advertisements and dating advertisements in our daily life and their research status in linguistic field, only few scholars have done researches on dating advertisements or job advertisements respectively. As a tentative attempt, the present study makes a comparative study on job advertisements and dating advertisements in realizing interpersonal meaning. In the present study, ten dating advertisements and ten job advertisements are chosen from recruiting and dating websites. The researcher makes a descriptive analysis of our corpus concerning mood, modality, person and appraisal.The thesis aims at discussing how interpersonal meaning is realized through mood, modality, person system and appraisal system in job advertisements and dating advertisements. After analyzing the samples, the researcher draws a conclusion about their differences and similarities. As two sub-categories of advertisements, job advertisements and dating advertisements have the same ultimate goal: to persuade the readers to take actions, but they exhibit some differences and similarities of devices to realize interpersonal meaning.First, in realizing speech functions of information-giving and action-demanding of job advertisements and dating advertisements, there exist both typical and non-typical ways, but the distribution of the mood types is different. In realizing information-giving, declaratives cover a large proportion in both advertisements, among which a lot of elliptical declaratives are used to convey job duties, qualifications etc. In dating advertisements, some interrogatives are adopted to create a sense of dialogue between advertisers and readers. In action-demanding, both types of advertisements apply few imperatives to fulfill this function, as soft-selling is really prevalent, although imperatives can be used to demand actions directly. Second, through analyzing the frequencies of modality in our samples, the researcher finds a wide application of high value modal verbs is used in job advertisements to show the company's authoritative status and the advertisement's objectivity, while in dating advertisements large quantities of low value modal verbs are applied to soften the advertiser's persuasive tone and make his/her volition clear. In the study of person system, a descriptive analysis has been done and great difference of usage of the first person pronoun is shown in dating advertisements and job advertisements: in job advertisements, advertiser treats the company as a whole so a lot of we, our are used to exclude the applicants and assure the company's authority. While dating advertisements, often representing an individual, tend to use more I my, while we usually refer to advertisers and applicants as a group. In so doing, the advertiser achieves his/her persuasiveness by shortening the distance between the two. Later on, the researcher makes the analysis of dating advertisements and job advertisements from the perspective of appraisal system. Job advertisements are found to follow the rule of being objective, with advertisers employing few affect words and much dialogic expansion while in dating advertisements, subjectivity is fully exhibited, so a large number of affect words are applied here and dialogic extraction is preferred. Graduation can find its place in both job advertisements and dating advertisements. |
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