A Contrastive Study On Interpersonal Meaning Of Chinese And English Cell Phone Advertisements

Language has more functions in expressing speakers‘ experience and inner motion.It also has functions to express speakers‘ identity,status,motivation,attitude and inference of other things,which is called interpersonal function.Through interpersonal function,the speaker can make himself or herself involved in certain situational context to express his or her attitude or inference in order to influence other‘s attitude or action.Halliday(2004)states that the interpersonal meaning in his systemic functional grammar(SFG)is the means of establishing and maintaining social relationships with others.The realization of interpersonal meaning may vary from function to function.This thesis intends to make a contrastive study on interpersonal meaning of Chinese and English cell phone advertisements based on Halliday‘s systemic functional grammar.With materials collected totaling over 40,000 words,this thesis selects 30 Chinese and 30 English cell phone advertisements from some famous official websites.It adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to make a contrastive study on interpersonal meaning reflected in ads.Since mood,modality and person pronoun system are the main realizations of interpersonal meaning,this thesis aims to find out similarities and differences from the three aspects in Chinese and English advertisements.Through the study of the collected data,some similarities of interpersonal meaning in Chinese and English cell phone advertisements are found as the following:(1)in mood,both Chinese and English discourses use declaratives most often in number to provide trustworthy and comprehensive information.Interrogatives,exclamatives and imperatives appear to attract the attention and interest of consumers;(2)as to modality,probability is used most frequently in both Chinese and English materials;(3)in person pronoun system,the second person pronouns account for the highest percentage among the three person pronouns.However,the disparities of interpersonal meaning between Chinese and English cell phone advertisements are outstanding:(1)in mood,there are a small number of English examples using imperatives to demand consumers to take action in purchasing;(2)in modality,English cell phone advertisements adopt more modalization than Chinese ads;Besides,Chinese cell phone ads have higher frequency of modulation than English materials;(3)in person pronouns system,it is obvious that English advertisements use more third person pronouns than Chinese ads;And Chinese advertisements employ more first person pronouns in materials than English ones.Second person pronoun “您” can be seen in some Chinese cell phone materials to show respect to consumers.