| With the rapid development of the economic society, the English advertising discourse becomes more colorful and exquisite. The advertisers employ all kinds of ways to design the advertising language or words to attract customers. Based on the corpus, this thesis will analyze the English advertising discourse focusing on interpersonal meanings of person. According to Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), it regards language as a system of meaning potential realized by a system of three metafunctions constrained by the context of culture and context of situation (Halliday, 1994). The three metafunctions involve ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The further explanation is made that interpersonal function refers to all uses of language to express social and personal relations. The interpersonal function is realized by mood, modality, person, appraisal, and so on. On the base of SFL, lots of linguists and scholars take researches in various fields to study the interpersonal function, expanding to advertising discourse. Take Geoffery Leech and Jan Svartvik as examples, they wrote the book A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language which analyzes the structures and functions of advertising course. The domestic expert, Professor Li Zhanzi, focuses on interpersonal function by mood, modality and persons and explores the realization in different discourse, such as autobiography discourse, valuation and prejudice discourse.This thesis will create corpus to analyze the interpersonal function by different persons in English commercial advertising discourses. In such a context, the following questions are expected to be answered in the thesis: 1) What is the frequency of utilization of different persons in English commercial advertising discourses? 2) What are the interpersonal functions of persons in English commercial advertising discourses? 3) How do persons realize the interpersonal function in English commercial advertising discourses? This research is made on the base of the corpus consisting of 30 English commercial advertisements from five widely-published authentic English journals-Reader's Digest, Elle, New Yorker, Time and Business Week during 2010-2011. Basing on corpus analysis and quantitative and qualitative researching, the major finding as follow: (1) The person in the commercial advertising discourse plays an important role indeed. There are 102 personal pronouns in the total of 1167 words. The different person accounts for different proportion. The first person is 18.6%. The second person is 57.8%, while the third person is 23.6%. (2) After analyzing the corpus, the different persons realize the various interpersonal meanings. However, the aim of using person to realize interpersonal meanings in the English commercial advertising discourse is to shorten the gap between the advertisers and potential consumers and make the advertisement more reliable and acceptable.(3) There are various methods to realize the interpersonal meanings by different persons. The different person stands for advertisers, consumers or both. It is complex, but they aim to create dialogism with the potential consumers and let the addressees fell that the advertisement is talking something to him/her personally.This research based on the theory of Systemic-Functional will surely become a supplement to the previous studies in the related linguistic field and it may be a hint of further study in this field and study will offer important theoretical base for designing English commercial advertising discourse and will be helpful for promoting products and/or services by attract potential customers'attention. What's more, the research will provide an instrument for customers to judge and treat the ads wisely. Meanwhile, the research is good for the learners to understand the commercial advertising discourse and feel it in deep level. |
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