| Movie trailer,or movie preview, is usually a 2-3 minutes video clip consisting of a series of short scenes excerpted from the upcoming movie, accompanied by narrator's voice and other shooting information of the movie. As one of the most popular and effective means of movie advertising adopted by movie makers these days, it has never been systematically studied as a genre from a linguistic perspective.Aiming at studying the movie trailer from a systemic-functional perspective, the author conducts a detailed analysis of 40 Hollywood successful movie trailers based on Hasan's model. These particular 40 trailers are chosen according to the accumulative box office generated by the movies over the years. Based on the sample analysis of the 40 movie trailers, the thesis arrives at the Generic Structure Potential and Contextual Configuration of the movie trailer, revealing unique features of this genre at the strata of context and semantics. The author finds out that the prominence of the movie trailer lies in its structural formation.The present study also uses the same genre model to compare the genre of movie trailer with its online and offline counterparts, namely the movie plot summary and the movie poster. It is found that the movie trailer does share some similarities with its online and offline counterparts. However, the distinctions between the movie trailer and its counterparts still outweigh their similarities, which consequently enable the movie trailer to stand out as a new genre of interactive communication.As the genre model adopted in the present thesis yields comprehensive and convincing results in analyzing the movie trailer and comparing it with other genres, the systemic-functional approach is verified as instrumental and effective in studying this dynamic and interactive genre of movie trailer in the Internet age.
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