| In modern society, advertisements have been widely employed to publicize and promote products and services. With distinctive features, advertising texts have attracted widespread attention from academic field both at home and abroad. Studies on advertisements have been conducted from various perspectives, such as lexicology, pragmatics, stylistics, translation, psycholinguistics and functional grammar. In his book Theory and Practice of Discourse Analysis: a Study in Advertising Discourse (2001), Huang Guowen discusses the application of Problem-Solution discourse pattern in advertisements and finds that in advertisements, of the four parts,’problem’ and ’solution’ are obligatory while ’situation’ and ’evaluation’ are optional. Based on this finding, this thesis will conduct a study on the appraisal meaning expressed in the discourse of advertisements. Specifically, we are interested in how appraisal meaning is expressed in the’problem’and the’solution’part of the advertisements within the framework of the Appraisal System.Appraisal theory, as a new development in the study of the interpersonal meta-function within Systemic Functional Linguistics, is an ideal analytical framework for studying the language of evaluation, attitude and emotion. The system will help us find out how a text’s proposals and propositions are positioned interpersonally. Appraisal system is concerned with the linguistic resources by which the writer or speaker can express their attitudes, get involved in propositions, and grade the assessment of meaning. There are three sub-systems under the Appraisal system:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation."Attitude is concerned with our feelings, including emotional reactions, Judgements of behaviors and evaluation of things. Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse. Graduation attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred (Martin&White2005:35)." The sub-systems of the Appraisal system are interacting and forming a whole. This theory is not only systematic as it recognizes comprehensive categories on the types of evaluation but also highly operable. Therefore, it can be applied to do research on various discourses to get the evaluative meanings and discover the interpersonal relationship encoded in the text. Generally, advertising language makes the most of appraisal resources to express advertisers’attitudes towards and comments on products or services so as to influence the potential customers to purchase the promoted products or services. To analyze advertisements texts of the Problem-Solution pattern from appraisal perspective widens the study of adverting and offers new vision to the development of the Appraisal system and its application.This thesis makes a quantitative and qualitative study of50English commercial advertisements which are of the Problem-Solution pattern from appraisal perspective. Appraisal meaning in the’problem’part and the’solution’part of all the sampled texts is analyzed respectively and the distinctive features in each part are identified:(1) In the ’problem’part, Attitude is overly and substantially used to negotiate empathy with potential consumers; negative value dominates appraisal resources; both explicit and implicit ways are used to make evaluations towards problems and people’s feelings.(2) In the’solution’part, Appreciation is abundant and most of the Appraisal value is positive; next to Attitude, Graduation is the second most frequently used subsystem.The study not only enriches the research into advertising discourses, but also offers insights into the writing and appreciation of English commercial advertisements. |
PDF Full Text Request