The Rhetoric Of Public Service Advertising In English Magazines: A Narrative Criticism

Today, more and more Public Service Advertisings (PSAs) come to people's eyes to call for environment protection, resource reservation, and humanistic concern. PSAs have become tools for helping with the "socialist spiritual civilization". Under this circumstance, the study of the rhetoric of PSAs is necessary and significant.This present thesis applies both qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore the rhetoric of PSAs on the English magazines from three levels:narrative elements, narrative signs, and narrative tone in the framework of narrative criticism. These three levels analysis go from narrative content to narrative form, from macro to micro and return to macro again. (1) On the first level, we analyze the key narrative elements and their relations of all 50 sample PSAs. (2) On the second level, we analyze narrative signs by examining the characteristic of verbal text at lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical level and the characteristics of the visual texts concerning three types of signs (icon, index, and symbol). (3) On the third level, we analyze three narrative tones: Sweet, Tough, and Stuffy by counting the rate of every tone in to find out the main tones of PSAs and their motivations behind 50 sample PSAs.The research finds that, (1) narrator, setting, characters and theme are the key narrative elements of PSAs and they interact mutually to present audience a worldview to accomplish the rhetoric purpose. (2) The frequent use of transitive verbs, especially the verbs of material processes shows the ad writers'purpose to induce cooperation actions in their audience; the frequent use of first and second personal pronouns narrows the gap between the addressers and addressees and thus make the persuasion easily accepted; simple sentences predominating over complex ones makes persuasive claim easily understood; much more declarative and imperative sentences than interrogative and exclamatory presents the facts clearer and give requests and command explicitly; many rhetoric figures are used makes statements more vivid and persuasive; the three types of visual signs (icons, indexes and symbols) are employed to complete and add information to the verbal texts to enforce warning and persuasion. (3) In English magazine PSAs sweet tone is employed to call for the public sense of love and duty, and make the requests easily accepted, while tough tone is preferred when the warnings and commands are given to show the civil responsibility for protecting the public interests and the serious attitudes towards the behaviors threatening the public interest.