Persuasion Of Public Service Advertisement From Functional Stylistics

As a persuasive discourse, Public Service Advertisement (PSA for short) is supposed tospread valuable social notions, arouse public attention in the shortest time and promotechanges in attitude and behavior of the public. Therefore, it is important to strengthen thepersuasive characteristic of advertisement language. Although many scholars in semiotics,sociology, pragmatics and other fields systematically explore the language features of PSA,the discussion about its relation to situational relevance has not yet been widely developed.As a branch of modern stylistics, Functional Stylistics based on the systemic-functionalgrammar focuses on how prominent stylistic features at different levels realize the languagefunctions in the stylistic procedure that consists of analysis, interpretation and evaluationphases.Based on this, the thesis applies Functional Stylistics to the analysis of how PSAachieves its persuasion in situational context by means of prominent stylistic effects. And thequalitative method and relevant statistics are employed in constructing of the stylistic featuresof29PSAs from different language levels with the help of systemic-functional grammar onthe foundation of Functional Stylistics. According to what is discussed, stylistic features ofPSA are concluded and interpreted from whether or not the discovered ones are in line withHalliday’s “motivated prominence”.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter1is the introduction, which mainlydescribes the background, purpose and significance of research, research questions andmethods and the structure of the thesis. Chapter2reviews the relevant researches onpersuasion, Functional Stylistics and PSA. In Chapter3, Functional Stylistics’ view—styleas motivated prominence, the influential elements of motivated prominence and procedure ofmotivated prominence in discourse analysis are elaborated as the theoretical framework.Chapter4is the main part of the thesis, which is divided into two sections. The first sectiondescribes the prominent style features of PSA at different levels: the graphological contrastsuch as types of print, shape and punctuation are the prominent features at graphological level; nominalized words or phrases and numerals are used at the lexical level; at the syntactic level,the prominent features are reflected in the application of material process, the declaratives andpresent tense, the simple theme, especially the unmarked ones; meanwhile, the rhetoricdevices such as repetition, parallelism and ellipsis are used in the analysis of semantic levels.The interpretation of the stylistics features of PSA from motivated prominence in situationalcontext is in the second section. The last part is the conclusion, in which the findings,implications and limitations are pointed out.