Metafunctional Analysis Of Printed English Beauty Advertisements

With the development of commodity economy, advertisements appear at every aspectof human life. The study of advertising English is catching the attention of domesticas well as foreign scholars. Due to the increasing consuming power and the risingsocial and economic status of women, beauty advert is becoming an important part ofall kinds of adverts. Systematic Functional Grammar is widely used as a tool toanalyze various texts including spoken language, novel, news report etc. This thesisanalyzes the lexico-grammatical features and the realization in certain context ofsituation of printed English beauty adverts using Systematic Functional Grammar asthe framework.This thesis firstly introduces the purpose of the present research and the thesisorganization. Then it generalizes the domestic and foreign studies of advertisinglanguage. The following stated is the methodology employed in the present researchand the data scope and data resources. After that, Systematic Functional Grammar isgenerally reviewed. The important concepts (such as transitivity, mood and modality,theme and rheme) which are closely related to and serve as the theoretical basis of thepresent research are introduced in detail. Subsequently, the above notions arediscussed and analyzed combined with some of the data collected, showing themethodology and procedure employed by the author, and then the data are analyzed indetail and the data analysis is closely related to register, especially the three registervariables: field, tenor and mode.By analyzing, it is found that in experiential function, material process is usedfrequently to provide concrete information of the advertised product. In interpersonalfunction, the two participants in the communication situation are of unequal tenorrelations as far as the knowledge about the advertised product is concerned. Theinformation on the products the readers get is from the description of the advertisers,but the right to buy or not to buy the advertised products is in the hand of the readers.And the advertisers try to make the language atmosphere relaxing and make therelationship between the advertisers and readers intimate by using ellipses andabbreviations, in the hope of making the adverts more appealing to the readers. Intextual function, single theme, simple multiple theme and unmarked theme are used tomake the text more informal and be of spoken style, establishing a friendly, kind andintimate air. Another very important finding is that all the lexico-grammatical choicescan reflect tenor features of discourse.This thesis shows that the language features are defined by certain context of situation,and it also proves the practicality and applicability of Systematic Functional Grammar.The findings of present research hold some implications for English teaching andEnglish learning.