| We are swimming in an ocean of advertisements. Advertising has penetrated intoevery corner of our life and its transmitting media exist in various forms: newspaper,magazine, TV, radio as well as Internet. Advertising has in fact become anindispensable part of the modern society, reflecting and influencing the economicdevelopment of a society, people's lives as well as their cultural values. While wecan find studies on many different kinds of advertising such as clothing advertising,food advertising, and automobile advertising and so on, there are few studies on realestate advertising. The present study thus focuses on real estate advertising, taking,into consideration the flourishing development of real estate and the important rolethe real estate advertising plays in real estate development.Under the framework of the subsystems of the three metafunctions withinSystemic-Functional Grammar, the present thesis uses as corpus 30 randomly.selected real estate advertisements from some influential real estate websites ofEnglish-speaking countries. By using Concordance and Word List tools of LATAntConc 3.2, quantitative analysis is carried out to investigate the stylistic featuresof real estate advertising discourse. And qualitative analysis of case study is thenconducted to testify the stylistic features of the real estate advertising discourse. Inorder for the analysis to be more comprehensive, vocabulary and person systemanalyses of real estate advertising discourse are added, thus the unique feature ofvocabulary in the real estate advertising discourse is stressed as compared with thatof Leech's (1966) study of English advertising. After such analyses, the thesis comesup with the following findings:(1) Ideational Metafunction:(a)Transitivity Structure: Material processes dominate real estate advertising.Then come relational processes and mental processes. The existentialprocesses are rarely used.(b)Voice: Active voice dominates the real estate advertising. The passive voice isonly used on special occasions to express the design of the real estateadvertising or location of the real estate.(c)Vocabulary: Some high-frequency words are found to display the lexical features of real estate advertising. "Large" is a frequently used adjective inreal estate advertising whereas "big" is such a one in the general Englishadvertising discourse.(2) Interpersonal Metafunction:(a)Mood System: The declarative mood enjoys the highest frequency in realestate advertising. Next is imperative mood.(b)Modality: Can and will are most frequently used in real estate advertisingwith can showing permission while will showing belief.(c)The second person pronouns you and your are the most frequently used. Thencome the first person and the third person.(3) Textual Metafunction:(a)Thematic Structure: Unmarked themes are most frequently used. The mostusual form of marked themes is prepositional phrase Most clauses have thereal estate or real estate facilities or outdoor amenities as the Theme anddetails of the real estate, real estate facilities, or outdoor amenities as theRheme.(b)Thematic Progression: The type of thematic progression of real estateadvertising is Derived Theme Pattern. The real estate is Macro Theme. Eachparagraph has its own Hyper Theme derived from the Macro Theme and thetype of thematic progression within each paragraph is Linear Theme Pattern.In passing, the author points out the limitations of the present study and suggestssome perspectives for further study.
|
PDF Full Text Request