Interpersonal Meaning Of Mood System In English Public Service Advertising Texts

This thesis aims to explore how interpersonal meanings are realized by Mood System in English public service advertising discourse.Halliday is the initiator of Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG),and SFG plays a very important role in various discourse analyses.Halliday's interpersonal function is the function of interaction of people.Mood system as a way of realizing interpersonal meaning is a great tool to analyze discourses.Halliday(1984) studies the development of dialogue and the mood system in young children's language.Mood consists of Subject and Finite.Different mood structures represent different speech functions.Many scholars like Thibault and Li Zhanzi have done significant researches on mood system.Besides,Huang Guowen (2001) analyzes the advertising discourse and on base of this,Sun Ran(2004) does analysis on public service advertising through text pattern and Chen Linlin(2007) covers the interpersonal meaning of Chinese public service advertising.However, there are comparatively few investigations,which focus on the interpersonal meaning of mood system in English public service advertising texts.Therefore,the thesis aims at the interpersonal meaning of mood system in this register.With the rapid development of the society,many social problems,such as pollution, AIDS,poverty,drug,natural disasters,need to be solved with the efforts of the government,the individual and the community groups.To solve these social problems, public service advertising is created.It aims to inform the public of those important social issues and problems,to attract people's attention on these things and stimulate their positive action to take part in the campaign to solve these significant issues.It is the medium between the advertiser and the audience;it can indicate the relationship between the advertiser and the audience as well as the interaction and negotiation between them.Therefore,it is meaningful to study how advertiser builds relationship with the audience and how advertiser persuades the audience to take positive action through a variety of linguistic strategies.The research randomly selects 35 samples from the English public service advertisements issued by the American government on the internet.The American public service advertising originated from the year 1941.In 1942,the War Advertising Council was set up and it became a major instrument of the information policy of the Government.After the war,it changed its name into Advertising Council,which developed into six organizations.It has been raising a lot of funds and help for the public service issues since then and becomes an influential public service agency. Since the United States is the pioneer in the development of public service advertising, the research on American public service advertisement may help the advertisers or students in China to learn some valuable insights and help them to create better public service advertisements.It may also enrich the studies of advertising discourse and attract more scholars to do researches on this kind of discourse through different perspectives.Moreover,this research may help understand why and how different mood systems are used for particular purpose.This will help the student to learn more about the relationship between communicative purposes and linguistic features.Considering the situation that there are few researches on different perspectives of mood system in the realization of interpersonal meaning in English public service advertising texts,this study fills this gap.In this research,the mood system resources are studies to show how interpersonal meanings are realized in English public service advertising discourses.This realization is done through the following steps:the realization of mood through different syntactic patterns,lexical choices,tense and voices,and interpersonal metaphor of mood.The whole thesis is made up of five chapters:an introduction of the whole thesis; the literature review of the interpersonal meaning of mood system in various discourse types and the studies on public service advertising texts;the theoretical framework of Mood System,including mood theory,mood vs.modality,and mood system;a theoretical framework for the analysis of English public service advertising texts;an analysis of the interpersonal meaning of mood system in English public service advertisement through syntactic patterns,lexical choices,tense and voices,and interpersonal metaphor of mood;and at last is the conclusion of the thesis.The research finds that in English public service advertising texts,the advertiser uses various linguistic resources(whether it is the syntactic patterns,the lexical choices or tenses and voices or interpersonal metaphor of mood) to realize different purposes of the advertisements(giving information or command).In a word,all these perspectives of mood system in the realization of interpersonal meaning in public service advertisement can have many functions.They can help to attract the audience's attention.They can strengthen the persuasiveness of the content of the advertisement, and build the intimate relationship between the advertiser and the audience and thus stimulate the audience to take positive actions and solve the social problems with other people.