A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of The Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And English Cell Phone Advertisements

After analyzing interpersonal meaning in advertisements,previous studies mainly adopt qualitative methods.And they also focus on either English or Chinese advertisements,while few attempts to compare or contrast the interpersonal meaning in Chinese and English advertisements.In addition,few studies have been done of interpersonal meaning in cell phone advertisements.In view of such research gap,this thesis attempts to make a contrastive corpus-based study of interpersonal meaning both in Chinese and English cell phone advertisements based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL).A corpus of 47 Chinese cell phone advertisements and the other corpus 47 English cell phone advertisements have been built on samples randomly collected from official websites of Chinese and foreign cell phone brands(2016-2018).This thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of interpersonal meaning both in Chinese and English cell phone advertisements in terms of mood,modality and person system and find out similarities or differences in the realization of interpersonal meaning and explain the reasons behind them.A detailed contrastive analysis revealed that Chinese and English cell phone advertisements have multitude similarities.Yet major differences between them exist with respect to the realization of interpersonal meaning.Similarities are manifested in the frequent use of declaratives,probability modal type,low and median value modal operators and second-person pronouns as well as rarely-used interrogatives and first-person pronouns.The major differences lie in the following two aspects:(1)Declaratives,probability modal type and second-person pronouns are more frequently used in Chinese cell phone advertisements.(2)Imperatives and third-person pronoun are more used in English cell phone advertisements.Different social-cultural backgrounds may account for these differences.There are theoretical significance and practical significance in this thesis.Theoretically speaking,this study broadens the application of SFL.Practically speaking,its findings on the differences between Chinese and English cell phone advertisements provide guidance for the writing and translation of advertisements.