A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English Advertising Language

The importance of advertising in modern society is greatly highlighted by a speech from Asian Outdoor Advertising Forum stating that world is composed of water, air and advertising. Advertising discourse has been studied from the angle of stylistics, pragmatics and semiotics by researchers at home and abroad. The thesis tries to study grammatical metaphors in advertising language from the perspective of functional linguistics.Grammatical metaphor was first introduced by Halliday in his An Introduction to Functional Grammar. In the book, Halliday not only differentiates grammatical metaphor from lexical metaphor, opening a new area for the research of metaphor; but also classifies grammatical metaphors into two types: ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor, and analyzes them in detail. Since then, Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory is employed in scientific, news, law discourse by a lot of followers. The thesis tries to study grammatical metaphor in English advertising language to find out if grammatical metaphor exists in English advertising language and work out what functions grammatical metaphor has in helping advertising language achieve its persuasion purpose.The thesis contains six chapters. Chapter one introduces topic sources, significance and methodology of the thesis. Chapter two introduces the theoretical base, namely Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, including theories of some other scholars. Comparing Halliday's theory with others', the thesis concludes that other scholars'opinions either follow Halliday's theory or need further improvement, so this thesis finally takes Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory as theoretical basis. Chapter three introduces the basic knowledge of advertising, including its definition, classification, language features and functions, and points out that grammatical metaphor exists widely in advertising language according to the analysis of the distribution of grammatical metaphor in advertising language. Chapter four and five, the backbone of the thesis, mainly analyze how grammatical metaphor helps advertising language achieve its persuasion purpose. Chapter four explores functions that ideational grammatical metaphor performs in the accomplishment of persuasion purpose. The study in this chapter finds out that advertising adopts nominalization to make its language concise and the content as objective as possible, uses adjectivalization to make its language vivid and the content as attractive as possible, and employs verbalization to make its language concise and dynamic and the content as impressive as possible. Objectivity, brevity, vividness and concision of advertising language will imperceptibly influence consumers'inclination and determination, thus achieving its persuasion purpose. Chapter five tries to find out functions that grammatical metaphors of mood and modality perform in the realization of persuasion purpose. The research shows that, in advertising, grammatical metaphors of mood are expressed in four forms: statement realized by interrogative mood, command realized by interrogative mood, statement realized by imperative mood, and command realized by declarative mood. They play many functions in helping advertising realize its persuasion purpose such as arousing consumers'curiosity and inducing them to pick up more information by expressing their meaning in an incongruent way, getting consumers'favor and increasing their acceptability by showing politeness in their metaphorical way . In terms of grammatical metaphor of modality, there are two forms: explicit subjective form and explicit objective form. They also pave a way for the achievement of persuasion purpose by taking modality responsibility to increase credibility and showing politeness to get a good depression from consumers. Chapter six draws a conclusion and states the limitations of the thesis and what it should work on later.