| In today’s society, commercial advertisements are almost everywhere, havingextensive and profound effect on people’s life. Advertising English has its specialstylistic features. Many linguists have studied advertising English from its languagefeatures and social functions effectively. However, research of interpersonal meaningin advertising discourse is comparatively rare. Halliday makes great efforts inexploring the interpersonal meaning of language and develops a basic framework foranalyzing the possible realization of interpersonal meaning, such as mood andmodality system. Based on his model, other scholars (Matin,1992; Thompson,2000;Li,2002) extend the framework and figure out the tense, pronoun system, directquotations, evaluations, etc. are all important ways to realize the interpersonalmeaning. These studies enrich the scope of interpersonal meaning. Based on anelaborate framework, the present research on interpersonal meaning in commercialadvertising texts can be carried out.This thesis studies commercial advertising English according to Halliday’ssystematic functional grammar, summarizes different methods and patterns to realizeinterpersonal meaning in commercial advertising English. Through the research, wefind that the use of mood, modality, personal pronoun and evaluation play animportant role in the realization of interpersonal meaning in commercialadvertisements. The present research attempts to analyze interpersonal meaning incommercial advertising in order to find out how linguistic patterns reflect interpersonalmeaning in such texts. In this thesis, the author seeks answers for the followingquestions:(1) How can mood convey interpersonal meaning of commercialadvertising?(2) How can interpersonal meaning be realized through the modalitysystem in commercial advertising discourses?(3) How does the person systemcontribute to the interpersonal meaning of commercial advertising?(4) How isinterpersonal meaning realized through the evaluation system in commercial advertising discourses?In this thesis, the author collects about80commercial advertisements fromforeign English magazines such as Newsweek, Time, Fortune and many websites. Bydoing quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data, the author analyzesinterpersonal meaning in commercial advertising English and draws some conclusions.In the study of the mood system, it is found that declarative mood, imperative moodand interrogative mood can realize interpersonal meaning as typical and non-typicalmood. Interpersonal meaning varies according to different kinds of mood. The studyof modality covers uses of modal auxiliaries, modal adjuncts and metaphoricalexpressions. By the analysis of distribution and frequencies of modal expressions, it isnoticeable that modal expressions do not frequently appear in commercial advertisingtexts. In the study of personal pronouns, the author makes analysis from theemployment of the first personal pronoun, the second personal pronoun and the thirdpersonal pronoun. Besides, the combination of the first and second personal pronounis also studied. It proves that the personal pronoun as a common practice is oftenutilized by the advertiser to interact with potential customers in commercialadvertisements. Then, in the observation of evaluation, it is found that persuasivewords such as evaluative adjectives, adverbials, nouns, comparatives and superlativesare employed throughout commercial advertisements.It is hoped that this study may provide some implications for the study ofadvertising texts from the perspective of systematic functional grammar. |
