A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American Real Estate Advertising Texts:Critical Discourse Approach

In recent years,with the rapid development of the realty industry,it becomes a driving force for the economic prosperity of various countries.In China,real estate advertisements are increasingly published.While in America,it is also very common to be published in various media.In this way,real estate advertisements in newspapers are one of the main sources of real estate information.But with the differences in economy,culture and other aspects between China and America,the real estate advertisements published in the newspapers have their own characteristics.In addition,the development of these advertising plays a decisive role in the promotion of houses,real estate advertisements for houses promotion could be seen everywhere.However,a few advertisements can persuade customers successfully to take action.With this ill-adapted situation of the development between those real estate advertisements and housing industry,it is therefore imperative to study the real estate advertising language.This thesis expects to conduct a contrastive study on 50 Chinese and 50 American real estate advertising texts from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis.The research questions are listed as follows.Firstly,what are the linguistic features to be identified in Chinese and American real estate advertising texts? Secondly,what economic and cultural factors are affected similarities and differences of Chinese and American real estate advertising texts? And lastly,what ideologies are reflected through distinctive linguistic features in Chinese and American real estate advertising texts?The framework of the research is Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,description,interpretation,and expectation.For the description,this thesis is mainly analyzed from mood system,modality system and person system of interpersonal meaning in Systematical Functional Grammar.The interpretation model applies the theory of intertextuality and the last model mainly explains reasons for differences and similarities between Chinese and American real estate advertisements and embedded ideologies implied in the both countries.Through previous chapters,it is found that second-person pronouns are utilized most frequently in the real estate advertising texts both in China and the United States.In China,those texts not only adopts the second person pronouns “you” but also utilizes exclusively honorific term in China,“您”,to show respect for consumers so as to increase the self-esteem of customers.Multiple forms of the second person pronouns appear in the American real estate advertising text,such as “you”,“your”,“yours” and “yourself”.Furthermore,the American texts adopt the third person pronoun “it” to attract potential consumers,because the pronoun is free from being subjective and exaggerated.In the interpretation,most of Chinese real estate advertising texts adopt cultural intertextuality and specific intertextuality to present information of the property.Since Chinese people are influenced by collectivism,they pay more attention to the concept of family and education of their children.Languages in the United States are direct and linear since the United States belongs to the Low-Context culture.American advertisers therefore mainly adopt imperative sentences and declarative sentences to introduce detailed information of real estate with objectivity,such as internal structure,infrastructure and other detailed information.Americans are concerned about personal privacy due to the sense of individualism,hoping to have their private space.The words like “private space”appear frequently in the texts.Besides,there are many pet-related introductions in the American real estate advertising texts.