A Contrastive Discourse Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And English Automobile Advertisement

Language is used by people in daily communication not only to describe the world around them but also to interact with each other in order to establish and maintain appropriate relations between them.Such function is called interpersonal meaning of language in systemic-functional linguistics.Advertising is a kind of communication between the advertisers and the readers,so the interpersonal meaning in it needs to be highlighted.The present paper sets out to investigate the interpersonal meaning of automobile advertising texts based on an elaborated Halliday's conceptual framework.Interpersonal meaning is concerned with 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 own viewpoint on things in the world,and to elicit or change theirs(Halliday,1994).According to Halliday the mood and modality systems are the basic means to realize interpersonal meaning lexico-grammatically in the clause.Based on Halliday's model of interpersonal meaning,other scholars(Martin,1992;Thompson,2000;Li Zhanzi, 2002) further enrich or extend the scope of interpersonal meaning.The researcher makes a critical view of the previous studies of interpersonal meaning and analyzes the realization and difference of interpersonal meaning from four aspects:mood, modality,evaluation and person system in the discourse of Chinese and English automobile advertisements.Through the study of this thesis,there are some similarities between Chinese and English auto advertisements:(1) the majority of the sentences in Chinese and English auto advertisements are written in declarative mood;(2) in terms of mood adjuncts, both in Chinese and English samples,there were no examples in types of readiness, typicality and obviousness;(3) abundant adjectives and adverbs are used in Chinese and English auto advertisements.Nevertheless,the disparities between the two samples are outstanding:(1) more interrogative and imperative sentences are used in English auto advertisement,so as to give the language variety and make it friendly,and to achieve the aim of persuasion; (2) low value modal operators are more commonly used in Chinese auto advertisements.However,English samples frequently use the median value modal operators.There are also high value modal operators used in the Chinese discourse to express the copywriter's confidence in the tourist spot and to convince the readers;(3) in terms of person system,the frequency of personal pronouns in English samples is much higher than that in the Chinese ones;Chinese samples have two kinds of forms "你" and"您" in the second person to show politeness,while the English ones only have one form "you".All in all,from the above aspects,we can see the different features and different cultural inclines in Chinese and English auto advertisements.