A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And British Dating Advertisements

Nowadays, influenced by the vigorous development of dating advertisements, more and more people begin to put their attention on the dating form, which has been considered as a fashion of’modern’language. Linguists have made enormous efforts on discourse analysis of dating advertisements from different perspectives so as to make the research flourishing. However, comparative studies on dating advertisements from the perspective of appraisal theory have not attracted enough attentions yet.In the theoretical frame of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, appraisal theory originates from the study on interpersonal function. As a resource of semantic study on interpersonal activities, appraisal theory is mainly exhibited in the field of lexis. In term of appraisal alone, it includes attitude, engagement and graduation. Attitude system, the key of appraisal theory, consists of three subcategories:affect, judgment and appreciation. Appraisal theory is increasingly used to various discourse analyses in the process of development. This paper tries to explore the differences between Chinese and British dating advertisements from the perspective of attitude system in appraisal theory. The aim is to find out the different choices of using expressions between men and women in the different cultural backgrounds. Through contrasting and analyzing the distribution of Chinese and British dating advertisements in attitude system, this thesis provides an insight into the hidden culture characteristics and differences behind two different languages and then moves forward to dig the differences between two countries such as cultures, lives, thoughts and world views etc, which has important and positive significance that will accelerate the intercultural communication. Besides, it is helpful to understand transnational marriages by comprehending different cultural values of China and Britain.The data of this thesis are mainly from representative presses of China and Britain. The Chinese dating advertisements are collected25male and25female dating advertisements respectively from two well-known magazines:《Jia Ting》(Family) and 《Zhi Yin》(Bosom friends); the British dating advertisements are gathered the same numbers from ’Style’, a special edition of the Sunday Times. The thesis makes thorough qualitative and quantitative researches based on the100dating advertisements of China and Britain. The aim of quantitative research is to know the distribution of Chinese and British dating advertisements in attitude, while the qualitative research is to dig the hidden and influential social-cultural factors behind two different backgrounds.The thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to show the background, significance and methodology of the research, data collection, and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two offers a brief literature review of dating advertisement and attitude system in appraisal theory. In addition, there are some comments about previous studies in order to find out the research space for the current study. Chapter Three is the theoretical framework. Three subsystems of appraisal theory are explained, but more emphasis is put on the introduction of the subsystem--attitude, which paves the way for the following study. Chapter Four proceeds to a contrastive study. It sums up the distributions and preferences of attitudinal resources by analyzing the collected data so as to explore the social-cultural factors that contribute to the similarities and differences of the discourse structures between the two languages. Chapter Five summarizes the major findings of the research, then points out the limitations of this thesis and finally provides some advice for the further exploration.