Narrative Rhetorical Criticism On Chinese TV Public Service Advertisements

Advertisements,with their growing influence on human’s life since their appearance,can be considered as a tool of publicizing products and promoting their sales.Public service advertisements(PSAs for short),also called public interest advertisements,are distinguished from commercial advertisements because they are designed for the purpose of maintaining social justice and ethics,and instilling in the minds of the masses public awareness and humanistic spirits for the sake of improving their attitudes and behaviors.Nowadays,PSAs are playing a crucial role in the progress of spiritual civilization construction.Since advertisements are gaining much more popularity in social life,an increasing number of researches concerning advertisements have been conducted.However,the studies on PSAs are far from sufficient.This thesis will take the theory of narrative rhetorical criticism as a framework,and choose 30 Chinese PSAs on the website of Chinese Center TV PSAs(1)as corpus.Both qualitative and quantitative research methods will be applied to explore the rhetoric of narratives in Chinese TV PSAs from three levels.Analysis on these three levels goes from narrative content to narrative form,from micro to macro.(1)On the first level,narratives in the chosen Chinese TV PSAs are identified and analyzed from the perspective of narrative elements,narrative structures and narrative signs.(2)On the second level,the rhetorical situation of Chinese TV PSAs is analyzed to pave the way for the discussion of rhetorical operative mechanism.(3)On the third level,rhetorical functions of narratives and their realizations are analyzed.In addition,this thesis tries to answer the following two questions: First,what motivation lies behind Chinese TV PSAs? Second,how does the rhetor convince his audience and achieve identification with them?The research findings are as follows.(1)The key narrative elements of Chinese TV PSAs include narrator,setting,character,audience and theme,and they interact with each other to realize the rhetorical purposes of narratives by providing audiences a worldview;both parallel narrative structure and evolutionary narrative structure enable audiences to gain important information and be persuaded in an easier and more efficient way;transitive verbs,especially verbs of material processes,are frequently used to better realize PSAs’ purpose of inducing cooperative actions of their audience;the first and second personal pronouns are frequently used to narrow the gap between the rhetors and audience so as to make persuasion easily accepted;simple sentences predominating complex ones makes persuasive claim easily understood;the skillful handling of narrative signs including the application of verbal signs,visual signs which include colors and shots and auditory signs which include voice,music and diegetic sound,can help to create identification with,and persuade,the audience.(2)Since rhetors are trying to persuade the audience to take actions through narratives in Chinese TV PSAs,rhetorical situation analysis should pay attention to the various aspects of audience,such as values,interests and cognitive habits and reveal how audience are induced by rhetors to cooperate.(3)Inductive function,argument construction function,and cognitive function of narratives in Chinses TV PSAs are realized,and the techniques to realize these functions include argumentation and identification with audience.Narrative rhetorical criticism is an effective tool for the analysis of TV PSAs,which can not only help people generally understand human symbolic behaviors,but can also enrich the perspective of rhetorical criticism.