Chinese Magazine Advertisements To Persuade The Nature Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Advertising is an important social phenomenon in the information age. A successful advertisement mainly gains the key features of attention value, memory value and persuasive power. A persuasive genre, different from other daily conversations, is gaining more and more attention. Various approaches have been applied to the advertising language studies, including sociolinguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, semiotics, functional linguistics and so on. Substantial research works have been published in the descriptions and explanations of vocabulary, syntax and rhetoric features. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is also called Critical Linguistics which demonstrates the ways in which various aspects of grammars are connected with power and ideology. In advertising, the ideology meaning works as underlying social cognition. This paper holds the opinion that the social cognition hidden behind advertising language is the main factor that manipulates people's purchasing action. Therefore, critical discourse analysis is an effective tool in advertising studies. In the theoretical application of CDA, scholars at home and abroad have set a good example in the analysis of various discourses. Based on the comprehensive previous studies, this thesis is applies CDA into a popular fashion magazine in Chinese. It is designed to discover the advertising writing features in the realization of the function of persuasion in advertising.The data collected for this study consist of 59 advertisements from 12 Ray, the Chinese fashion magazines, issued from the year of 2008 to 2009. I give a comprehensive descriptive analysis from various aspects, including transitivity, thematic progression, intertextuality and interpersonal system. Also some percentage distributions of several linguistic patterns in advertisements are analyzed. Based on the data analysis, a conclusion is drawn that advertisers provide information about products and services to consumers and realize the function of persuasion implicitly through linguistic devices. Hence, advertising language manipulates people's consuming ideas.