An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese Household Appliances Advertisements

The purpose of commercial advertisements lies in passing the related information of products to readers, and thus realizing the objective of persuading them to purchase goods. As one kind of the most important commercial advertisements, Chinese household appliances advertisements are ubiquitous in people’s daily life and greatly influence people’s consumption choice. The language used in household appliances advertisements, as a special expression means, embodies the interaction between the advertisers and potential consumers by means of various linguistic approaches. Those advertisements function as a bridge for communication between the participants. Thus, by exploring the interpersonal meaning consisted in the Chinese household appliances advertisements, we can better understand how Chinese advertisements utilize different linguistic resources to achieve various interpersonal meanings in order to induce people to purchase goods and promote sales.Interpersonal function, as one of the three meta-functions of Halliday’s theory, not only refers to the relationship established by participants in a dialogue by means of language, but also consists of the influence exerted on people’s behavior. The theory underlies the analysis of interpersonal meaning in various types of discourses. Afterwards, it has been much enriched and developed in many aspects. One eminent representative is Li Zhanzi who carries out significant researches from many other perspectives, such as person system and tense system.This thesis is aimed at probing into 40 Chinese household appliances advertisements from mood, modality and person systems under the guidance of systemic functional grammar combing some theoretical expansions advanced by Li Zhanzi and Thompson The significance of the study not only lies in proving the feasibility of applying interpersonal function into the analysis of Chinese advertisements, but provides people with useful purchase suggestion and supplying advertisers with valuable ideas for writing advertisements.There are six chapters in total of this study. The first chapter mainly introduces the research background, research objective and significance, research questions as well as research approaches. Chapter two primarily reviews studies on interpersonal meaning and also its application into advertising texts both home and abroad. Chapter three overviews the theoretical framework this study lies in. Chapter four, which is the most important part of the study, focuses on how to realize interpersonal meaning in Chinese household appliances advertising texts. And the last chapter draws a conclusion which summarizes the findings, limitations and suggestions of this research.Through the analysis, interpersonal meanings embodied in Chinese household appliances advertisements are mainly from the perspective of mood, modality and person systems, which are characterized by many aspects. In mood system, declaratives, as the main means to inform people enough information of advertised products, are the most frequently employed than the other two. Compared with declaratives and imperatives, interrogatives can enhance the exchanges between advertisers and potential customers for its being much more interactive. Thus, they are also frequently used in advertisements. In modality system, modal volitives of low and median values are more frequently employed in Chinese household appliances advertisements to show the ad-makers’ confidence in their products, and also make it possible that consumers can consider for by themselves and avoid distrust and aversion. In person system, the first, second and third person systems are applied into advertisements in various forms. Among them, the second person pronoun appears far more frequently than the others. From the analysis, we can get a proper use of person pronouns can strengthen readers’ feelings of participation, cut the psychological distance between advertises and readers, and thus build up a good relationship and then get potential customers be persuaded to purchase products.