An Analysis Of Car Slogan Based On Register Theory

With rapid development of China’s economy and great improvement of people’s living standard, the car has no longer been a symbol of power nor social status and we have already stepped into automobile era. This background brings the sprout and exuberance of car slogan nationwide. In the past few years some scholars have done researches on car slogan with papers mainly focused on classification and features description in rhetorical, cultural, physiological, pragmatic aspects and so on, while not many studies of car slogan are conducted from Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective.Chinese car slogan, a variation of standard official language of China, is formed in the context of automobile-mediated communication. Register Theory, which is an important constituent of Systemic Functional Linguistics, is mature in both theoretical study and practical research. The theory maintains that register is a functional variation in situational context and it has three variables: field, tenor and mode. The objective of this thesis is to adopt qualitative methods to inquire into the linguisitc features of car slogan based on Halliday’s Register Theory. 150 car slogans are adopted as research data, among which 50 car slogans are collected from field work,80 from net pictures and 20 from magazines. It attempts to resolve the following three questions:(1) What are linguistic features of car slogan influenced by the field variable?(2) What are linguistic features of car slogan influenced by the tenor variable?(3) What are linguistic features of car slogan influenced by the mode variable?From field analysis, it can be found that although car slogan on the whole is an open register which allows for various topics, the majority of those topics are safety-relevant, and the top three aspects on discussion list are the speed, the distance and the driving skill. Transitivity analysis reveals that a great number of verbs and adjectives are used to respectively express material process which discusses physical actions related to driving, and relational process which conveys information about the quality of driving skill, the condition of car and the identification of driver.From tenor analysis, exploration in power aspect shows that some owners of carslogan would self-dispraise by using the vocative“您”to show respect, employing declarative clause to express command indirectly and applying negative attitudinal lexis to describe themselves; while other owners of car slogan would boast themselves by using the vocative“你”to address readers, employing imperative clause to issue orders directly and applying positive attitudinal lexis to describe themselves.Exploration in solidarity aspect shows that psychological distance is greatly narrowed down by resorting to kinship term, the politeness term“请”before imperative clause,and humor made from catchword or popular saying.From mode analysis, it can be found that language in car slogan plays an ancillary function and car slogan is the written form of speech. Limited space of car slogan requires conciseness of its language, so ellipsis is frequently used on lexical level,grammatical element within a clause and conjunction between clauses. The combination of image and verbal text exhibits car slogan’s creativity. Through exploring the representational meaning, the interactive meaning and the compositional meaning of car slogan, we can find that image and word can work together to create a synergic effect.This thesis aims to apply Register Theory to analyze the restrictive correlation between three variables of car slogan register and actual language choices, broaden research scope of Register Theory and provide a new perspective for appreciating car slogan. It is hoped that this tentative analysis will be useful and helpful for further research.