A Comparative Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In English And Chinese Pharmaceutical Advertisements In Light Of Appraisal Theory

In this thesis, the author investigates how evaluative resources across Englishand Chinese contribute to the persuasive purpose of pharmaceutical advertisements.Detailed discussion is directed initially at the distinguishing lexical features in thisgenre. Then both explicit evaluative lexis and implicit means of realizing evaluativemeaning are explored. This thesis draws on Appraisal Theory (Martin&White,2005)with its special focus on the semantic domain of Attitude. Its three subsystems,namely Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation, are examined respectively.Methodologically, this corpus-based study presents a qualitative and quantitativeanalysis of80product-specific pharmaceutical ads collected from newspapers andmagazines. They are first coded with attitudinal features, and then put to statisticalanalysis with the assistance of corpus tools. In addition, this thesis compares andcontrasts the attitudinal resources preferred by each language to inform ourunderstanding of the sociocultural differences underlying the construction ofdiscourse.Keyword analysis shows that words related to diseases and treatment areunusually frequent, and the evaluation of efficacy and side effects is the central themeof this genre. The distributions of the three subsystems of Attitude display a similarpattern. Both languages are abundant in resources of Appreciation in pharmaceuticalads, especially one of its subtypes, Valuation. Findings also point to a heavier relianceon implicit attitudinal resources in the two subsets of the corpus. The most significantdifference between English and Chinese pharmaceutical ads lies in the polarity ofattitude. An overwhelming majority of the attitudinal resources are positive in Chineseads, while positive and negative attitudes are evenly distributed in English ads. Fourmeans of conveying implicit evaluations are explored, namely comparative items,metaphor, narration, and ideational meaning. The interaction of explicit and implicitevaluation contributes to the persuasive function of pharmaceutical advertisements.