Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In English Commercial Advertisements

Commercial advertisements, as a sub-category of advertisements, belong to the persuasive genre, aiming at resorting to the language appeal strategy to execute the purpose of promoting sales. Therefore, it will reveal how consumers are brought to attention, interest, desire and action by commercial advertisements. Substantial and fruitful researches have been conducted on commercial advertisements from different perspectives of linguistics. Appraisal Theory which takes 'system' as the core and 'Appraisal' as the focus is the new development of the Systemic Functional Linguistics.Appraisal Theory adopted in this thesis is a system of semantic resources to explore rather than clause rank grammar, to describe and explain the way language is used to evaluate, to negotiate and to manage interpersonal relationships. Appraisal Theory consists of three sub-systems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. In this thesis, the researcher conducts a tentative analysis of the Attitudinal resources in commercial advertisements within the framework of Appraisal Theory, trying to explore the distributuons and preferences of Attitudinal subsystems.The corpus employed in this research are mainly from Advertising English (1993) and partly from China Daily (2005), from which 60 typical discourses of commercial advertisements are chosen to analyze how the Appraisal resources are employed to make the commercials more persuasive, and thus urge the consumers to take buying-action. The author employs the software - Systemic Coder to make statistical analysis of the distributions of the Attitudinal resources in commercial advertisements and further gives relevant and reasonable explanations.Some tentative research findings have been discovered in this research. First, commercial advertisements are heavily Attitude-embedded with a view to achieving persuasive functionality and prompting consumers' buying-action completed. The distributions of all subsystems of Attitude are not well-proportioned. Among the three Attitude variables, Appreciation (62.1%) is overtly and substantially foregrounded rather than Affect (17.5%) and Judgement (20.4%). Second, Attitudinal resources are mainly realized by adjectival Appreciation and the word "new" is found to be the most frequently used adjectival Appreciation. Within the subcategory of Appreciation, reaction type with more occurrences of quality and impact (37.6 %) is given additional load than valuation (11.8%) and composition (12.6%). Third, though Judgement is not pervalent in commercial advertisements but it plays an indispensable role in commercials. Within the subsystems of Judgment, the number of normality and capacity outnumbered veracity and propriety with a view to evaluating their products and services in term of the consumers' capability and normality. Fourth, Affect accounts for practically the same proportion as Judgement in commercial advertisements. Affectual values are mainly realized by verbs of emotion, among which the verb "enjoy" is the most frequently employed in this research. Positive Affect and negative Affect are inevitably interactive and complementary. To some extent, some negative Affectual values in commercial discources facilitates the expressiveness of positive Affect and vice verse.This thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One offers a brief literature review of previous studies of advertising English. Chapter Two explains the Theoretical Framework - the Appraisal Theory, with the research focus on its sub-system—Attitude. Chapter Three introduces the methodology employed in this research. Chapter Four makes a statistical analysis of the distributions and preferences of Attitudinal resources and illustrates the functionings of each variable of Attitudinal resources. The Conclusion section sums up the major findings of the research, offers its pedagogic implication, and points out the limitations existing in the present study.Based on Appraisal Theory, this thesis analyzes the Attitudinal resources in commercial advertisements with a view to bringing new light to writing commercial advertisements and teaching English commercial reading.