A Functional Stylistic Study Of English Advertisements

With the development of social economy, more and more advertisements have come into our life. In order to sell their products, the sellers should first make these goods known to the consumers. Nowadays, advertisement has already become an indispensable part of our daily life. Its extensiveness and glamour lie not only in its functions but also in its language. Although the artistic value of advertising language is not as high as that of novel and poetry, it has its own special features. Hence, it has aroused many linguists'attention. And previous studies mainly focus on lexicon, rhetorical devices, or syntactical level. During recent years, some researchers began to analyze the linguistic features of English advertisements with the help of Systemic Functional Grammar theories; however, their analyses are not systematic and comprehensive enough.On the levels of discourse, grammar, lexicon and graphology, the author decides to carry out a quantitative analysis of 30 English advertisements on the basis of Systemic Functional Linguistics from perspectives of cohesive devices, transitivity system, mood type, thematic structure, word class frequency, layout, etc., hoping to find their stylistic features which are closely related to the contextual factors with the help of"foregrounding"theory. Hopefully, the study will make a little contribution to the teaching of English advertisement writing by offering constructive suggestions.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 gives an introduction to the whole thesis, such as the objects, purpose and significance of the research, as well as the research methodology and data corpus. Chapter 2 is the literature review of stylistics, functional stylistics and the present research state of this topic. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework upon which the thesis is based from four levels. Chapter 4 is the main body of the whole thesis, and in this chapter the stylistic features of English advertisements are presented at four levels, in the order of theory introduction, case study and quantitative analysis. Chapter 5 gives interpretations of the findings in the previous chapter with reference to the context theory. Chapter 6 gives the conclusion of the whole thesis and points out the limitations as well.Through the quantitative analysis of 30 English advertisements on four levels, their stylistic features are explored and concluded as follows: (I) At the discoursal level, it is found that reference and lexical cohesion are frequently used in English advertisements to make the whole text cohesively united while substitution, ellipsis and conjunction are less frequently used. And this realizes the way written advertisements express themselves and thus coincides with the mode of English advertisements. (II) At the grammatical level, it is found that material process, relational process and mental process are the three major process types in English advertisements, that declarative mood is the dominant mood type, and that most themes in English advertisements are simple and unmarked. All of these realize the basic function of advertising—informing, and coincide with the field of advertisements. (III) At the lexical level, it is discovered that English advertisements tend to adopt a large number of adjectives to introduce the commodities, including their comparative and superlative forms and emotional words. This reveals that advertisements try to persuade customers into making purchase by giving information about commodities, and it also coincides with the tenor of English advertisements. (IV) At the graphological level, it is found that exclamative mark, dash, quotation mark, bold, italics, centralization, and capitalization are adopted either to get readers emotionally involved or to foreground information so as to capture readers'attention. This again reveals that advertisement tries to persuade readers into purchasing the commodities—which is its ultimate goal—by deeply impressing them, and that coincides with the mode and tenor of English advertisements. The stylistic features of English advertisements are in accordance with their field, tenor and mode.It is expected that the thesis could prompt our study of English advertisements and contribute a little to the teaching of English advertisement writing.