Pro-environmental Public Service Advertisements In Chinese And English: A Cross-cultural Perspective

As the global environmental pollution and ecological destruction have become increasingly serious issues, more and more people have been attracted to environmental problems and have participated in environmental campaign in various ways. Public service advertisements (PSAs) play a significant role in propagating environmental issues and environmental knowledge. As an effective vehicle to publicize social values and serve for the public benefit, PSAs are usually sponsored by enterprises, governmental institutions, non-profit organizations (NPOs), social public or individuals to arouse the public's environmental awareness and to make the public take action to protect the environment.Nowadays when the world economy, mass media and environmental protection are being globalized, we should take the responsibility to devote our limited power to protect the environment. Thus, to make a further study of the relationship between pro-environmental PSAs and social culture from a cross-cultural perspective is still of theoretical and practical significance.Incorporating the linguistic and the western rhetorical approaches into the cross-cultural study, the thesis attempts to conduct a comparative analysis on pro-environmental PSAs in Chinese and English (of which are mainly print PSAs). Chapter 1 introduces the background, purpose, significance and methodology of the study. Chapter 2 defines advertising and PSAs, and explains the relationship between PSAs and environmental protection. Chapter 3 sets the theoretical framework for the study, including linguistic approaches, rhetorical approaches and cross-cultural approaches, and reviews previous research on PSAs. Based on carefully collected data, Chapter 4 compares the verbal and visual contents in Chinese and English pro-environmental PSAs from linguistic perspective at two levels (lexical and syntactical) and rhetorical perspective (rhetorical figures and persuasive strategies). In Chapter 5 the relationships between pro-environmental PSAs and social culture are mainly discussed. The findings of this thesis are expected to be of help in better understanding pro-environmental PSAs in different cultural background and in better designs of them, so as to promote the communication of environmental protection between China and the west.