A Contrastive Study On The Interpersonal Meaning Of American And Chinese Pharmaceutical Advertisements

With the improvement of the living standard, health has become a public concern attached increasingly great importance to. For the sake of health management and maintenance, people are frequently involved in the purchase and usage of drugs. Pharmaceutical advertisements, as a means of learning about various drugs, are omnipresent and influence people’s understanding about and selection of particular drugs directly or indirectly. Pharmaceutical advertising is also a significant means for pharmaceutical companies to introduce the relevant products and boost sales revenue. Language is a communicative factor in the effectiveness of pharmaceutical advertising. The study on interpersonal meaning of pharmaceutical advertisements is conducive to the understanding of how drug advertisers or producers exploit language to communicate with the potential consumers and influence their viewpoints or behavior for the sake of persuasion.Interpersonal meaning, as one of the three metafunctions of language, is a subject of increasing interest in both foreign and domestic studies. Different definitions have been proposed as to what interpersonal meaning is. In general, it refers to the meaning language constructs when people use language to interact with each other, establish and maintain relations, express attitude or viewpoints, and influence attitude or behavior of others. This paper researches into the interpersonal meaning of 74 pharmaceutical advertisements selected from magazines, newspapers and websites in the U.S. and China, under the guidance of Halliday’s interpersonal meaning as well as Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the linguistic features of American and Chinese pharmaceutical advertisements in realizing the interpersonal meaning as well as the similarities and differences thereof are identified. Also, the underlying reasons for such similarities and differences are explored.The paper finds that American and Chinese pharmaceutical advertisements share much similarity in a general sense, but there are specific significant differences in the realization of interpersonal meaning. In view of Mood, the giving role greatly outnumbers the demanding role. Both groups of advertisements involve the dominance of declaratives to state information directly related or leading to drugs. In this way, the advertisers present themselves more often as “the provider”, rather than “the demander”. The advertisers endeavor to render the presentation of information and the calling of action more natural, acceptable or believable by means of a flexible and integrated utilization of declaratives, imperatives, interrogatives and exclamations. Meanwhile, American PAs more significantly apply imperatives for both demanding and giving as well as interrogatives for giving, whereas Chinese PAs more significantly apply declaratives for giving. In terms of Modality, the pharmaceutical advertisers are inclined to employ low value Probability to measure the effects of drugs or the likelihood to suffer from a health problem, together with high value Usuality to draw attention to a health problem or encourage the use of drugs. American PAs tend to use more median value Probability compared with Chinese ones, while the latter comparatively involve more high value Probability, Obligation and Inclination. With respect to the Attitude system, Appreciation occupies the highest percentage to evaluate the worth of drugs, while Affect is the most infrequent. Positive polarity is preferred in Appreciation. As regards Judgment, Social Esteem is much greater than Social Sanction in quantity. When examined more specifically, it can be seen that American PAs involve significant overuse of negative Valuation and Chinese PAs significant overuse of negative normality. When it comes to Engagement, pharmaceutical advertisements are generally embodied by Monoglossia. In regard to the occasional use of Heteroglossia, American PAs comparatively overuse Contraction while Chinese ones overuse Expansion. Regarding the Graduation system, both groups of PAs employ a much greater proportion of Force than Focus, and the majority of Force resources are up-scaling to highlight the effects of drugs. But simultaneously, American PAs apply a more significant proportion of both up-scaling and down-scaling Force. On the whole, the similarities between American and Chinese PAs are closely associated with the illustrative and persuasive features of pharmaceutical advertising, as well as the efforts made to strike a balance between being science-oriented and persuasion-driven, and the differences thereof are attributable to cultural and policy factors.