Interpersonal Meanings In The Discourse Of Public Service Advertising

This thesis aims to explore how interpersonal meanings are realized in the discourse of Chinese public service advertising, drawing on systemic functional grammar. In China, public service advertisement is a new discourse type, usually released by governments, charity organizations, other organizations for public service and some advertising agents. The purpose of public service advertising is releasing government policies, promoting desirable lifestyle and high moral standard and appealing to the public to offer help to victims in disasters. In general, it is a discourse with persuasive intent, aiming at instilling thoughts in the public. In China, public service advertising is mainly released by organizations with absolute authority over the public, which makes it important to justify the authoritative identity of the advertiser to the audience to achieve ideal communicative effects. This thesis studies the lexico-grammatical resources that realize interpersonal meanings in the target discourse. Interpersonal meaning is defined as the strand of meaning produced when we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our attitude toward what we say and other beings in the world, and to elicit changes in others (Halliday, 2000). In the present research, we focus on three lexico-grammatical resources—mood, modality and person—to see how interpersonal meanings are realized and explore further the advertiser-audience relationship as is reflected in these resources.The corpus used in this research, 600 samples in total, comes from print public service advertisements in newspapers and magazines, those currently broadcast on TV or radio and other files obtained from the Internet. The thesis carries out descriptive analysis of mood, modality and person system of each sample and explores their functions in expressing interpersonal meanings.It is found that in Chinese public service advertising discourses, an overwhelming majority of moods are declaratives, which are used to give information and also give commands in occasional cases. The imperative mood and interrogative mood render a dialogic effect to the discourse, making the discourse interactive. In our corpus, advertisers use more imperatives than interrogatives, which can be explained by the fact that advertisers, who have greater power over the audience, tend to "talk" to the public in an authoritative tone. Studies on modality system reveal that modal expressions of obligation and inclination (modulation) account for more than a half of all the modal expressions used. This corresponds with the purpose of public service advertising, which is to tell the public what they are expected to do. It is also found that over a half of the modal expressions of obligation are in negative forms, telling the audience what they should not do. This reflects the unequal power between the advertiser and the audience. Advertisers use a complex person system to adjust their relationship with the audience. When addressing the audience, the second person pronoun ni and nin (an address term showing deference) and first person pronoun inclusive wo men are often used, contributing to a better communicative and persuasive effect. The third person pronouns ta and ta men are also employed to avoid direct negative comments on the audience addressed.