An Analysis Of Chinese Public Service Advertisements From Aristotle’s Rhetorical Perspective

Advertisements, as a tool of publicizing and promoting the sale of products, haveinfluenced increasingly people’s life since its appearance. Public service advertisements(PSAs for short), which are also called public interest advertisements, are a kind ofnon-profit advertisement which is different from commercial advertisements. ChinesePSAs are designed for the purpose of promoting social justice and ethics, and infuse themass with public awareness and humanities spirits so as to help the mass improve theirattitudes and behaviors. Nowadays, they are playing a vital role in our spiritual civilizationconstruction. As advertisements are becoming more and more important in social life, moreresearches have been conducted. However, the studies to PSAs are only a few.In this thesis, the author will classify about200Chinese PSAs collected from TVand the Internet，and then analyze them systemically with Aristotle’s rhetorical theory ofthree appeals---pathos, ethos and logos. This analysis is aimed at revealing the rhetoricalphenomenon in Chinese PSAs to offer some help to the development of Chinese PSAs.Both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are employed to describe andanalyze all the collected Chinese PSAs. Finally the explanation will be given based on theresults of the qualitative analysis and the quantitative analysis of all the collected data.The findings in this thesis are: pathos is the appeal which is utilized most in ChinesePSAs; the three rhetorical appeal in Chinese PSAs are realized with different devices;Aristotle’s rhetorical theory of three appeals can be employed in English teaching.