A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And British Dating Advertising

In recent years, there is an upsurge of genre-based approach in cross-cultural studies at discourse level. However, dating advertising as a special genre has attracted little attention. The empirical study of its discourse and content has been largely neglected for several reasons.Based on the theoretical framework of Bhatia's move-structure, this thesis contrastively studies the text structure in Chinese and British dating advertising, thus exploring the underlying socio-cultural factors. This study intends to address the following questions: 1. Do Chinese and British dating ads share the same move-structure? 2. Do the same moves share the same sequence and proportion in both cultures? 3. Do the same moves share the same steps? 4. Do the same moves and steps contain the same contents?Fifty dating ads per language have been chosen as samples for this study by means of a qualitative and a quantitative research. The actual analysis of the texts consists of four steps. First, the move structure of each dating ad has been outlined with reference to the theory of 'move-structure' before comparison. Second, the components, sequence, and proportions of moves are compared. Third, the steps of move 1 and 2 are listed for comparison. Finally, the contents of move 3 and 4 and some steps in move 1 and 2 are also compared to see whether there exist some differences.The results show that, with regard to the components of the move structure, move 1, 2, 3 and 4 should be regarded as nuclear ones, among which 1, 4, are the crucial semantic units. As for the sequence of the move structure, it shows that Chinese ads have a more different organizational patterns and more complicated arrangement of moves than the British ads. As for the proportions of words used in move, in Chinese ads the number of words in move 1 differs little from that in move 2 while British ones contain much more words in move 1 than those in move 2. Besides, in Chinese ads the proportion of words in move 3 is much lower, while the proportionof words in move 4 is much higher than that in British ads. The comparison of proportions of the steps shows that there is a significant difference or a great significant difference in some steps. Moreover, there exist some differences in terms of the contents of move 3 and 4 and some steps in move 1 and 2. Finally, the results of the study are explored in terms of the economical background, family and marriage system, moral system and value orientation, and thought pattern in these two cultures respectively.