A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Male And Female Cosmetic Advertisements

Uni-modal cosmetic advertising is a persuasive or dominant sales tactic,using the Internet as a vehicle,whose function is to promote products,deliver product information,stimulate readers’ interest to increase sales,and ultimately achieve profitability.In order to achieve this commercial purpose,advertisers must establish good interpersonal relationships with potential consumers;therefore,the ads contain a large vocabulary of interpersonal meanings.Martin’s Appraisal Theory,which emerged from Halliday’s systemic functional grammar,complements the interpersonal function.Although advertising has been previously studied from the perspective of appraisal theory,there are few cases where gender has been used as an entry point for comparative research.In this paper,50 male and 50 female cosmetic advertisements were selected from the official websites of internationally known luxury brands as research objects,and the corpus tool UAM corpus tool was used for resource tagging to obtain the distribution of appraisal resources in cosmetic advertisements of different genders and to analyze the corpus for specific interpersonal functions.The following three questions are attempted to be answered:(1)How is interpersonal meaning realized in cosmetic advertisements of different genders?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the distribution of appraisal resources in cosmetic advertisements of men and women?(3)What are the reasons for the similarities and differences in the distribution of resources in cosmetic advertising for men and women?The study found that both male and female cosmetic advertisements use less affect resources to reduce the subjectivity of the advertisements;among the attitudinal systems,the differences in the distribution of resources between male and female cosmetic advertisements are more obvious in the judgment system and the appreciation system;female cosmetic advertisements use the appreciation system more to describe the qualities of the cosmetics themselves,while male cosmetic advertisements use more judgment resources to make social judgments about the cosmetic users;in graduation system,female cosmetic advertisements use the intensification system to regulate the strength of the discourse and guide consumption;male cosmetic advertisements use the quantification system to analyze the product quantitatively.This study broadens the scope of application of appraisal theory and investigates the similarities and differences between male and female cosmetic advertisements in terms of expressing attitudes and conveying interpersonal meanings,and these similarities and differences may also have an impact on the construction of cosmetic advertising slogans.