A Linguistic Study Of English Public Service Advertising From The Perspective Of Social Functions

Public service advertising is a special sort of advertising for marketing public awareness other than for ordinary commercial purposes. It's a kind of non-profit making advertisement. Public service advertisers use language to express their judgments and emotions, to inform their audience of challenges which they might not know or not take seriously, and to influence their actions and thoughts and stimulate their actions to modify some of their behaviors and offer supports verbally or financially. Public service advertising plays an important role in improving public conscience, encouraging people to take actions and promoting social progress.A tremendous amount of researches have been conducted on English advertising from different angles, but most of the scholars have concentrated their attention on commercial advertisements, while few researchers focus on the study of the public service advertising language. This thesis attempts to explore the linguistic features of English public service advertising texts from the perspective of Vestergaard and Schroder's sociolinguistic approach. Based on a corpus of English public service advertising texts selected from several popular American magazines, the author makes a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the language features and three functions. According to the functional analysis of English public service advertising language, it has been concluded that no matter the structure, the content, or the words are used in a public service advertisement, all of these factors serve the purpose of attracting the audience, of conveying information to them, and urging them to accept a certain attitudes or to take some actions. Besides, it is clear that public service advertising language also reflects the culture we are unconsciously in and the reality we are facing everyday.The social-functional analysis of English public service advertising language is not only of linguistic significance, but also of great social and cultural value. It can also help the English learners to comprehend English public service advertising from different angles. Meanwhile, it can help copywriters to cultivate the intercultural communication competence.