A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Commercial And Public Service Advertisements

Advertisements are very widespread nowadays and they play an increasingly importantrole in our daily life. Ever since advertisements appear, they attract attention of many scholars.Advertisements are broadly grouped into commercial advertisements and non-commercialadvertisements.This thesis is a contrastive study of the interpersonal meanings in20differentadvertisements under the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar. It intends to examinethe mood, modality, person and appraisal system in commercial advertisements and publicservice advertisements and try to finds out the reasons for these similarities and differences inthese two kinds of advertisements.20pieces of commercial advertisements and public service advertisements are selectedmainly from website www. Millerngo.com/ads:html and partly from the well-knownAmerican magazines: Fortune, Newsweek and The times. The four sub-systems ofInterpersonal meaning (mood, modality, person, appraisal theory) are adopted respectively toanalyze in detail the sample advertisements, using qualitative approach along withquantitative analysis.Though the contrastive study, there are some similarities in commercial advertisementsand public service advertisements. Firstly, most of the clauses are declarative ones in order toachieve the informative function; Secondly, In order to short the distance with readers andestablish interaction between readers and advertisements, they prefer to use various personpronouns; Finally, majority of the appraisals expressed are appreciation, which are powerfulin strengthening the advertising force and appeal or arouse readers’ desire to purpose theirproducts.The difference in commercial advertisements and public service advertisements are asfollows: Firstly, in order to arouse readers’ interest, more interrogatives are used incommercial advertisements. By this means, commercial advertisements interact with potentialconsumers. In addition, the usage of various moods meets readers’ need for novelty andmakes sustained reading of the advertisements. It can attract more readers. Secondly, publicservice advertisements prefer to use more modal adjuncts to emphasize the significance of thepublic event and call for the attention of the public. Thirdly, the interrogatives are used inpublic service advertisements which are employed to prompt action of the public. Finally, interms of the appraisal system, commercial advertisements express more subjective attitudefrom advertisers while public service advertisements are objective. This thesis mainly consists of six chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to thebackground, the data, methodology and question of the present study. Chapter two providesliterature review of the previous applications of SFG, especially interpersonal meta-function,as well as previous studies on advertisements. Chapter three presents the theoreticalframework with a detailed introduction on the interpersonal meta-function. Chapter fourintensively analyzes and discusses and analysis of the20advertisement samples in terms ofthe interpersonal meaning. Chapter Five is the concluding part which summarizes the majorfindings and suggestion as well as the limitations of the present thesis. Suggestions for futurestudies are also made.It is expected that this study can enrich various studies of advertisements and makepeople learn more the characteristics of these advertisements...