A Comparative Study Of Speech Act Characteristics Of English And Chinese Public Service Advertisements

Public service advertisement (PSA) is the one that serves for the society without making any profits, featured by social benefit, realistic subject and appealing manifestation. The first crop of PSA in its real sense could be dated back to the1940s in America, mainly aiming at appealing to the public for awareness and response to social problems. Nowadays in Japan, America and other western countries, PSA has become a real pubic instrument, permeating into almost each domain of people’s lives as an effective form of propagating social values and serving for the public. However, as a relatively fresh thing in China, the development of PSA is still in its infancy, with immatureness and imperfection in more than one aspect, including low level of creativity and lack of standardized management. Therefore, conducting a comparative study of the language use in English and Chinese PSAs could be beneficial for our country’s advertisement creation.Generally speaking, academic research on public service advertisement is inferior to that on its counterpart, another significant variety of advertisement—commercial ads, in both depth and breadth. Researchers mostly explore the dissemination mechanism of PSA from the perspective of media communication, or discuss social significance of PSA from a sociological viewpoint, or analyze rhetorical features of PSAs in terms of aesthetics. In a word, there are few systemic qualitative or quantitative studies of the language use of PSA applying linguistic theory, specifically Speech Act Theory in pragmatics. And almost none of them involve any comparative researches between two languages. Yet as PSA could be seen in its essence as a persuading behavior of the ad-writer to the audience, it is with no doubt appropriate and significant to analyze this literary form using Speech Act Theory, which is accounted as an important theory of pragmatics.In the present study, the author analyzes the two corpora (30English and30Chinese PSAs randomly selected from magazines) applying the Speech Act Theory of Austin (1962) and Searle (1979), especially Searle’s classification of illocutionary act and Indirect Speech Act Theory, aiming to explore the similarities and differences of the appearance frequency and distribution of the five types of speech acts in both English and Chinese PSAs. Two most frequently employed categories of speech act of the five are analyzed emphatically. The research has revealed that based on the two corpora in the current study, assertives and directives are the two most frequently used speech acts in both English and Chinese PSA, with assertives occupying a larger proportion in the Chinese corpus. In terms of single samples, assertives tend to hold a more subjective position in the Chinese corpus than in the English one. Moreover, different characteristics have also been reflected in specific uses of the two types of speech act of the two corpora. In the last place, the author briefly discusses possible factors resulting in these differences, and then provides reasonable suggestions for subsequent PSA creation.