A Study Of Interpersonal Function Of Mood In English Public Service Advertising Discourse

With the tight connection of the whole world, people find out that more and moreproblems appear in their daily life such as, family violence, child abuse, poverty,illness, environment pollution and natural disasters and so forth. Public serviceadvertisement, as an effective way to solve these problems for government and othercharity organizations, are different from commercial advertisement. Public serviceadvertisements are published by government or other charity organizations for solvingthese problems. Government as the authority is accustomed to give requirements andcommands to people, however, as a link between advertisers and audience, publicservice advertisements need to build and maintain the relationship with audience so asto stimulate them to take positive actions. Therefore, advertisers need to take audiencefeelings into consideration in order that they can accept the ideas of government.Choosing appropriate ways to communicate with audience is a critical point foradvertisers.Over many years scholars have focused more on the study of commercialadvertising than public service advertising. Until recently, more and more attentionsare paid to public service advertising. However, linguists have studied the publicservice advertisement mainly from sociological, rhetorical and psychologicalperspectives, seldom from systemic functional linguistics. That is to say, there is aspace for us to do some investigation to fill the gap. Public service advertising, as aneffective way to communicate with readers or audience is aiming to realize theinterpersonal function of mood. Halliday (2004) proposes that the realization ofinterpersonal function is through building and maintaining the relationship betweenthe speakers and listeners. Mood is very importance of realizing the interpersonalfunction through adopting different mood structures which consist of subject andfinite element, and the realization of different moods is mainly depending on the sequence of the subject and finite or the finite part. At present, many scholars havealready devoted their attentions to studies of mood system, for example, Li Zhanzi notonly provided a detailed introduction of mood system (2008), but has studied therelationship of mood and modality (2005). Meanwhile, some Chinese scholars havestudied the public service advertisement from mood perspectives, such as, Yang Shu,Kang Canhui and so forth.The study for English public service advertisement is more profitable for us tolearn how the interpersonal function of mood in English public service advertisementis realized so as to provide help and enlightenment to the advertisers in China, whowill adopt more appropriate mood to communicate with audience and realize theadvertisers’ intentions better. The present research can help scholars and studentslearn how the interpersonal function is realized through mood.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, the present research is tostudy the realization of interpersonal function of mood through the analysis of thedata. The mood system is used as the theoretical framework for the study of thepresent research. The analysis of the realization of interpersonal functions of mood isconducted from five perspectives: the three kinds of basic clauses, tenses, voices,ellipsis and minor clauses.All in all, it is necessary for advertiser to employ appropriate mood tocommunicate with readers or audience, promoting the interaction between them inorder that they can take positive actions to help others and realize the advertisers’ultimate intentions.