Inrerpersonal Meaning In Printed English Cosmetic Advertising

Cosmetic advertisements belong to the persuasive genre, aiming at resorting to the language appeal strategy to execute the purpose of promoting sales. Therefore, it reveals how consumers are brought to attention, interest, desire and action by commercial advertisements. Interpersonal meaning is concerned with the strand of meaning produced when we use language to interact with people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoints, and to elicit or change theirs. Halliday's framework of interpersonal meaning within his Systemic-Functional Linguistics mainly refers to mood system and modality system; however, according to Thompson (1996: 65), in discussing modality, we have moved from strictly grammatical issues towards areas which are more difficult to pin down in structural terms. In this sense, Martin's Appraisal Theory is complementary to Halliday's grammar-based model by focusing on the semantics of evaluation for exploring interpersonal meaning. Therefore, this thesis makes an endeavor to discuss the realization of interpersonal meaning in English cosmetic advertisements from perspectives of mood, modality and evaluation.50 texts of English cosmetic advertising were selected as our corpus from 12 English fashion magazines. The researcher carries out descriptive analysis in terms of mood, modality and evaluation based on the corpus and also makes elaborated distribution and frequency analysis of them. The analysis discovers that by the manipulation of mood structures, especially declarative mood structure, advertisers are mostly providing information in the limited advertising space instead of bluntly pushing consumers to purchase. Modal auxiliaries with high value occur with a much less frequency than those with low value, which indicates that advertisers representing sellers expect to be accepted by consumers and establish harmonious relations with them by lowering their own status in interaction and speaking in a tentative way. Evaluative lexis are in proliferation in cosmetic advertisements; they are employed and deployed to judge product users, using behavior and the product itself, and finally build the advertiser into the role of a guider in consumption. Advertisers also resort to heteroglossic engagement values to engage dialogically with alternative voices in persuasion, among which values Counter, Concur, Pronounce, Acknowledge are prevailing. They make choices on the continuum of'seeking common ground'and'reserving different', thus, they are creating a friendly communicative atmosphere while at the same time luring potential consumers with their fresh skincare knowledge and wish-fulfilling products. Moreover, advertisers employ graduation on a frequent basis to highlight the advantages of the product so as to help promoting sales.As a tentative study, this thesis has proved the applicability of mood, modality system and appraisal theory in cosmetic discourse analysis, and demonstrates the rules, regulations and traits of language use in cosmetic advertising. Such methodology and research results shed light on commercial advertisement, especially cosmetic advertisement writing and provide insights for consumers in cosmetic advertising understanding, appreciation and discrimination.