A Study Of Advertising Language From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

As a special type of communication, advertisement is the interaction of elements: participants, language, music, pictures, paralanguage, situation, etc.. Among these elements, language can be said to be the soul of advertising. Many scholars both abroad and at home have made great contributions to this research from the perspective of semiotic approach, stylistic approach, pragmatic approach, discourse analysis approach and functional approach. Based on these researches, this thesis attempts to investigate advertising language in the light of the theory of systemic-functional linguistics on grammatical metaphor.The term of grammatical metaphor (GM) was first put forward by M. A. K. Halliday in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985. It is an important part of Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG). Based on the congruence between language meaning and its expression, Halliday divided the different grammatical forms with the same meaning into congruent forms and metaphorical forms. According to the metafunctions of metaphorical form, GM can be divided into ideational GM and interpersonal GM. Based on this research, J. Martin puts forward the term of textual GM. He thinks that there are two realizations of textual GM: metaphorical theme and metaphorical new information.Halliday states that the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor is universal in all adult discourses. Thus many scholars employ this theory in the analysis of various discourses, such as the scientific discourse analysis, news discourse analysis and legal discourse analysis. This thesis attempts to study advertising language and aims to analyze the distributions and functions of GM in advertising language. We hope that this research can provide a new angle of view in advertising language analysis, and meanwhile broaden the study scope of GM.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. It gives a general introduction of some key factors concerning this study which includes the research topic, theoretical basis, purpose and significance, methodology and data collection, and the organization of the whole thesis.Chapter two is the literature review of studies on advertising language and GM theory. Several approaches to the language of advertising have been assessed. Each has its own drawbacks. At the end of this section, the author points out the feasibility and necessity of the present study.Chapter three displays the theoretical basis for this thesis. Both GM theory and advertising language are systematically elaborated. The definition of GM and its three subtypes are firstly discussed, which provides the framework for the following analysis. In the latter part of this chapter, the functions and features of advertising language are discussed. This chapter provides a guideline for the exploration of GM phenomenon in advertising language in the next chapter.Chapter four is the backbone of the whole thesis. It includes a general analysis of three types of GM in advertising language, data analysis and some findings. From the analysis we can see that the employment of ideational GM can increase the density of advertising lexicon, the use of nominalization, adjectivilization and verbalization make the advertising language more objective and more convincing. The realization of interpersonal GM is by using of interrogative sentence and imperative sentence. Interrogative sentence can arouse the curiosity and attract the sight of consumers. Imperative sentence can provide some suggestions and advices, and thus makes the consumers feel more intimate. Textual GM is realized through metaphorical theme and metaphorical new information in advertising language. The employment of textual GM makes the advertising language more creative.Chapter five is the conclusion part which includes the conclusion of this study, a short summary of the whole thesis. Furthermore the limitations of the study and prospects for future research are also presented.In summary, in order to get the special style effect and achieve the persuasive function, three types of GM are frequently employed in advertising language. In the future research, we should widen our research scope of GM theory, and increase the amount of data concerning their source and quantity. We hope that we could have a more thorough understanding of the GM in advertising language.