A Study On The Grammatical Metaphor In English Advertisements

Nowadays, advertisement bears close relationship with our daily lives and is alsoa highly persuasive text with a definite purpose. In order to attract customers andpersuade them to purchase their products or services eventually, the advertisersemploy various linguistic devices to retouch their advertisements, which attractlinguists’ attention. In recent decades, numerous researches on advertisements havebeen conducted from the various perspectives such as semiotics stylistics andpragmatics. However, the Grammatical Metaphor (hereafter referred to as GM) theoryis seldom employed in advertisement researches. Therefore, based on the previousconstructive researches conducted by linguists from home and abroad, the author triesto apply the GM theory in analyzing English advertisements.Grammatical Metaphor was brought forward by M.A.K. Halliday in his TheIntroduction to Functional Grammar, which became an important part of hisSystemic-Functional Linguistics (hereafter referred to as SFL) and sparked a heatedand lasting discussion. After decades of development, scholars begin to put the theoryinto practice, analyzing different kinds of discourses, such scientific and technologydiscourses, news reports and legal documents. However, due to the influence ofHalliday’s initial classification of GM, which contained only Ideational GM andInterpersonal GM and did not mention Textual GM that was put forward by Martinafterward, the previous analyses mainly focused on Ideational GM and InterpersonalGM, caring little about Textual GM in the discourses, which inevitably led to the lackof systematicness and comprehensiveness.Against this backdrop, the author combines Textual GM and the other two kindsof GM to form a comprehensive analysis framework, and then makes a detailedanalysis on the English advertisements collected from multiple channels in order toexplore the realizations and functions of each kind of GM in English advertisements.In this way, the author not only makes the GM theory a more comprehensive framework in discourse analysis, but also provides a new perspective foradvertisement research. Thus, the present research is of theoretical and practicalsignificance.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter one includes research background, research objectives, researchsignificance and origination of the thesis, providing a general view about this thesis.In chapter two, the author makes a literature review on GM theory andadvertisement researches respectively, the former part of this chapter contains theorigin and definition of GM and the researches conducted by scholars home andabroad in this field, the previous researches on advertisement are introduced fromdifferent analysis perspectives in the following part.In chapter three, a comprehensive introduction to the classification of GM willbe given so as to provide the theoretical backup and analysis framework for chapterfour and chapter five. Then, the features and functions of advertisements will beintroduced, because some features and functions of English advertisement could bethe reason for high frequency of GM. For example, one lexical feature of Englishadvertisement that could explain the high frequency of nominalization, verbalization,is the wide use of simple work that could save space and time, because thoserealization forms of Ideational GM is deemed as the semantic condensation orencapsulation of a phrase, a sentence or even a paragraph. The persuading function ofadvertisement requires a friendly and equal relation between customers andadvertisers, which can be achieved by applying Metaphor of Mood, a subtype ofInterpersonal GM, which could cultivates intimacy between customers andcompanies.Chapter four and chapter five are the main part of this thesis. In chapter four, therealizations of each kind GM in English advertisements are illustrated in great details.In chapter five, analyzed the collected advertisements, the author tentatively putsforward the functions of each kind GM in English advertisements such as “Increasing lexical density” by Ideational GM,“Cultivating intimacy” by Interpersonal GM and“Organizing text” by Textual GM.In the last chapter, the author points out some limitation of the present researchand provide some suggestions for the future research on GM theory.