Interpersonal Funtion Analysis Of English Perfume Advertising Discourses

As one of Halliday’s great achievements and a significant part of applied linguistics, since its coming into being in1950s, systemic functional grammar has been widely applied in numerous theoretical studies and practical researches. It intends to study languages of human beings from the perspective of their functional effect and Halliday holds in his masterpiece An Introduction to Functional Grammar that it can be used to analyze any kind of discourse, both written and spoken, which has been proved true in decades of years of study. Inspired by theories of Prague School, he proposed and developed the three metafunctions of speech: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. With both qualitative and quantitative methods applied, this paper collects65perfume advertisements and tries to analyze the function of the advertising from the perspective of mood system, modality and person pronouns in the framework of interpersonal function.In modern society, advertising has in a large part permeated into our daily life and is playing an indispensable role in promoting and prospering economy, and its essential role in commercial practice cannot be more emphasized. In other words, advertising has become an essential way for manufacturers to publicize their products, which endows great meaning to study the interpersonal function of advertising. The important function and special linguistic features of advertising have already drawn attention and interest of many linguists in recent years. So far, however, studies on advertising have mainly focused on lexicon, rhetorical devices, or syntactical levels, and to study advertising as a discourse is far from enough or specific, especially from the perspective of interpersonal function.This thesis adopts interpersonal function of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the theoretical framework to do discourse analysis on the65English perfume advertisements that are collected from the newspapers, magazines, television and the websites from the year1995to2012. It aims to find out the how these advertisements work and how language serves the advertisers to realize the persuasion and informing functions of advertising as a way of interaction.This thesis adopts quantitative method to find out how frequently mood, modality and person pronouns are applied in perfume advertising discourses, and then qualitative method is adopted in the following part to discover how interpersonal function is realized in these discourses by giving case studies to samples chosen from the population of65advertisements respectively from the perspective of mood system, modality, polarity and person pronouns system.According to the study in this thesis, some major findings are got that:1) different mood systems are applied in perfume advertising and advertisers incline to use declarative mood more;2) modality system is not clearly reflected in perfume advertising much;3) of the three kinds of person pronouns, the second person is applied most.In addition, the thesis points out the limitations in this study and also gives suggestions for further studies in this field.