Functional Discourse Analysis On Public Service Advertising: A Case Study

IMore than half a century has passed since Zellig Harris published a paper with the title'Discourse Aanlysis"(Harris, 1952). Discourse analysis, which is mainly concerned with language use beyond the boundaries of a sentence/utterance and focuses on the relationships between language and society, has undergone a radical shift with regard to its theoretical foundations, the scope and its purposes. Many disciplines that feed into discourse analysis have enriched the content of the discipline and greatly promoted its development, making it characterized as one of the vastest, but also one of the least defined, areas in linguistics. Many researchers claim in their works and writings that they are just exploring certain aspects of discourse analysis by employing a particular theory or method. This leads to what Schiffrin (1994) defined as'the methodological determinism and the issue of indeterminacy in discourse analysis'.Halliday (1994) notes that the aim for him to construe the systemic functional theory is'to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English'. Huang (2001a) conducted a comprehensive analysis on a piece of English advertising discourse, which covers almost all the important aspects of the profound theory. Huang called discourse analysis from functional perspective as functional discourse analysis and further explored the purpose, the scope, the procedures and methods of this approach.The present paper explores the way in which functional theory is applied to the analysis on a piece of public advertising discourse analysis. The research focuses on the crucial roles of contexts in discourse production and interpretation. As the realization mode of context of culture, genres exert their constraining and inhibiting functions on discourses. Generic features turn out to be present in this discourse. Register, which is the realization mode of context of situation, plays a role at the level of language use. Its three social variables are bound to affect lexico-grammatical choices. This confirms the declaration by Halliday that'choice is meaning'. The analysis demonstrates that discourse analysis is not only'an interpretative activity'but also'an explanatory activity'. The ultimate goal of discourse analysis is to evaluate whether a discourse is appropriate or not with respect to its communicative purpose. It may be concluded that functional theory is powerful enough to be taken as the theoretical foundation of discourse analysis and functional discourse analysis turns out to be an operatable, practical theory for discourse analysis.