| The studies on English advertisements in China begin in the early 1980s and become prosperous in the early 1990s. Most of these studies are from the lexical, syntactic or rhetorical perspectives. Others base their researches on the components of English advertisements and then analyze one specific component from the above three perspectives. The discussion about the Systemic-Functional Grammar in China begins in the 1970s. However, it is not until the late 1980s that it becomes a popular practice for many Chinese scholars. Most of these researches aim to introduce the fundamental claims of the SFG and only a few researches try to use the theories of SFG to guide the practice of translation. But few scholars make the attempt to use the theories of the SFG to analyze English advertisements. Even now the combination of the SFG and English advertising is little and is by no means enough. Owing to this situation, the author of this thesis makes a tentative endeavor to apply the theoretical claims of the SFG to the analysis of English advertisements, hoping to prove that the theories of SFG can be used to analyze English advertisements and are actually effective. In addition, with the globalization of the world economy, more and more companies are selling their products abroad. English advertisements are an indispensable part of their plans to promote their products abroad. As a result, researches on English advertising are becoming more and more useful and important. And this in turn adds the value of this thesis.Since the 1960s when Halliday puts forward his ideas on the systemic nature of language, he has engaged in setting up the Systemic-Functional Grammar. Halliday calls the grammar the Systemic-Functional Grammar because it consists of two parts: the Systemic Grammar and the Functional Grammar. The Systemic Grammar claims that language is a system network of meaning potential or that it isa semiotic system. Within this system network there are a great number of systems with their own scale and obligations. Each system serves the .purpose of expressing meaning. Language itself is a meaning potential. Therefore, every word we speak, every word we write is just a linguistic choice from this meaning potential. Just as Halliday (1985: 41) once says, "Choice is meaning", language is a set of possibilities of meaning and what we do is just making choices. The Functional Grammar is just a continuing work of the Systemic Grammar. It is called Functional Grammar due to the fact that Halliday classifies language function into three metafunctions: the ideational metafunction, the interpersonal metafucntion and the textual metafucntion. At the same time, according to Halliday, language is a systemic resource for expressing meaning in context and linguistics. By this he implies that language exists and must be studied in contexts such as professional settings, classrooms and language tests. And this leads to another concept of the SFG: register. The SFG linguists offer the three variants of register: field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse.To address the topic, this thesis adopts the method of positivism. Using all those claims of the SFG, the author analyzes twenty-two advertisements in detail. From the Systemic Grammar perspective, this thesis holds that since each of our linguistic behavior is a meaningful choice from the meaning potential of the language, a genre like English advertising is bound to be a series of choices from language system network. And all these choices must be capable of distinguishing themselves as the distinct features of English advertising. Therefore, the author believes that by pointing out these distinct features presented in the linguistic choices, readers can clearly see what makes English advertising a distinct genre. By doing so in the thesis the author finds that advertisers tend to use sentence fragments rather than complete sentences. From the perspective of Functional Grammar, this thesis discusses the salient features of English advertisements r...
|
PDF Full Text Request