Analysis Of English Vehicle Advertisement Texts From The Perspective Of Experiential Meaning

As the development of Chinese economy and society, motor vehicle manufacturing has become one of the mainstay industries of China and motor vehicles have become daily consuming goods for many Chinese people. Owning a car was once a kind of family or personal honor but now cars step off the throne and become a very common transportation tool. Due to the civil policy of promoting motor vehicle consumption, the competition between domestic motor vehicle manufacturers and foreign counterparts is getting much fiercer. Therefore, how to build up a strong domestic motor vehicle industry and how to win the fiercer competition over other foreign powerful competitors with richer experiences and widely known reputation have been confronted with Chinese motor vehicle manufacturers.In order to win, besides advancing the technology, advertising also functions to establish and maintain relationship between potential consumers and the advertisers. Thereupon, it will greatly assist us to study the motor vehicle advertising to understand how to use advertising to communicate with audience and further make them purchase the advertised product effectively. Therefore, the author finds it necessary to conduct a study of the textual features of the worldly known automobile companies'advertisements to provide our advertising copywriters with some reference.According to Halliday's critical masterpiece An Introduction to Functional Grammar, people could apply this theory to analyzing all styles of discourse in both spoken and written forms, in which there are simultaneously three levels of meaning. These three levels of meaning are:interpersonal meaning, experiential meaning and textual meaning, which are expressed respectively by mood and modality system, various types of processes and lexical cohesion or theme-rheme construction. Among these three levels of meaning, the author chooses to study the experiential meaning of 40 advertisements samples randomly selected from the official websites of the automobile manufacturers. By studying the narrative angles of the ads, the author concludes that three types of angles are applied in the narration of the motor vehicle ads, which are product-oriented angle; interaction-oriented angle and addressee-oriented angle. Advertisers use product-oriented angle when trying to portray the particular qualities, features, functions and awards of the product to give a direct image. Interaction-oriented angle is used when the advertisers want to bridge the distance with the addressees in order to give a more vivid presentation which could make the addressees feel stronger about the connection. The addressee-oriented angle, in another way, brings the addressees more direct feeling about what they shall get from the advertised product personally. After studying the experiential meaning of the texts, the author concludes that the advertisers of the motor vehicle tend to use relational processes, material processes and mental processes more frequently than the other three processes since the three more frequently used processes are more closely related with the field and tenor of the motor vehicle advertising.This thesis is comprised of five chapters:Chapterâ… is the introduction to this thesis. In Chapterâ…¡, the author gives some review of previous literature and studies. Chapterâ…¢mainly introduces the theoretical framework of this research. In Chapterâ…£, there are two sections regarding the analysis of the features of the English motor vehicle ads texts within the theoretical framework. Chapter V is the findings and implications of this study.