A Study On The Interpersonal Function Of Modality In Advertisement

According to Halliday, there are three metafunctions of language:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Modality is asubsystem of mood system, realizing the interpersonal meaning of language,which is a means of performing the interpersonal function. Although modalityhas been discussed widely, most of them have been convergent in thedistribution of modal expressions in different genres. Or only certain sub-branchhas been investigated by some researchers. The whole modality system receivedless attention. As a special communication between advertisers and consumers,the aim of advertising is to persuade, that is, to ask people to purchase theproducts. But advertisers can’t say this directly because this may offendconsumers and therefore advertisers like to employ conversational implicature inadvertising. Since modality is an important means of realizing the interpersonalfunction, it is meaningful to investigate how modality system realizes theinterpersonal function in advertisements. Based on the samples selected from English-learning websites and textbookson advertisement writing, this these tries to make a detailed study onadvertisements under the framework of Halliday’s Systemic-FunctionalGrammar. It mainly analyzes the modality system from the perspective of type,value, orientation and polarity and explores how the modal expressions aredistributed in advertisements and the interpersonal function of modality inadvertisements. In this thesis, both quantitative and qualitative analyses areadopted. Furthermore, with the help of corpus and computer software AntConc,the thesis aims to discover the characteristics of modality’s interpersonalfunction and also attempts to provide some related explanations from differentperspectives, which deepens people’s understanding of advertisement.By making the research, the author finds out that in advertisement,modalization expressions are more than modulation ones; modal expressions oflow value take the predominant role in the value perspective with median valuethe second; orientation is mainly achieved by objective and implicit expressions;positive expressions are more than negative ones. All these researches will make a great contribution to Chinese educators and learners’ understanding ofmodality system, which will help people master the interpersonal function ofmodality in different texts.