Realization Of Functional Tenor In Consumer Advertising

With the rapid development of international trade and information exchange, advertising becomes an even more important means for advertisers to popularize their products or services. The advertising language is the main carrier for advertisers to convey information; therefore, study on advertising language has obviously received a great deal of scholarly attention. Studies abroad focus on different aspects of advertising from linguistic approaches, semiotic approaches, and communication approaches. In China, the largest proportion of work on advertising language has come from the fields of stylistics and rhetoric. However, after reviewing the previous study on advertising language, the author finds that comparatively liitle research has been done from functional perspective. Based on -the theory of functional grammar originated by M.A.K Halliday, the current study attempts to explore how functional tenor is realized in print consumer advertising at lexico-grammatical level mainly with the aid of Transitivity, Mood and Modality.In this thesis, advertising is confined to print consumer advertising published in magazines and newspapers. Eighty advertisements are chosen at random from Times, Reader's Digest , U.S News, and China Daily, In the process of studying, Chi-square test is employed to testify the results of the statistics. The study reveals, in consumer advertising, functional tenor is mainly realized by material and relational processes, declarative and imperative mood, modal operator 'can', person system and attitudinal adjectives. The findings are explained in detail to show the reasons why, in consumer advertising, advertisers incline to use these linguistic devices to realize the functional tenor.The significance of the study is in two folds:Theoretically, this thesis makes contribution to testifying the enrichment and effectiveness of functional grammar in analyzing the realization of functional tenor.Practically, it gives some clues to the advertising copy writing, like how to properly use some linguistic devices to enhance the competitive power of product.