Discourse Analysis Of Garment Advertising From The Perspective Of Systemic-functional Grammar

In daily life, advertising can be seen in every corner of life and it transmits indiverse forms, such as television, radio, newspaper, journal, and Internet. In fact,advertising has already turned into an influencing part of modern informationalizedsociety: reflects and impacts our life, values and even the economic development ofsociety. It can also be found that some people have studied food advertising,automobile advertising, cosmetics advertising and so on. Although it is often said thatit is not a good idea to judge people by their first impression, garment can not beignored. What is more, it is even said that no other thing is more important than firstimpression in our communication with others. Therefore, garment has been paidincreasing attention. In modern society, garment advertising comes into existence invarious forms, novel styles and distinctive words. Taking into consideration of thereasons mentioned above, the focus of the study is on English garment advertisingdiscourse.Under the theoretical framework of the three metafunctions of Halliday’sSystemic-Functional Grammar, the thesis selects37garment advertising discourses asdata for analysis from some websites, journals and books held by English-speakingcountries, with the aim of researching different kinds of garment. And quantitativeapproach and qualitative approach are combined as the main analytical methods inthis analysis. In order to study and testify the stylistic characteristics of advertisingdiscourse, quantitative analysis is carried out, and then qualitative analysis isconducted aiming at the case. After the analyses, the thesis has drawn the followingconclusions:Firstly, in terms of Ideational Metafunction: for transitivity, material processdominates of all, and then come relational and mental processes. Besides, existentialprocess also appears while rare use of verbal process and behavioral process can befound. For voice, active voice is used more frequently than passive voice. Generallyspeaking, the latter is used to stress the material and design of the products.Secondly, in terms of Interpersonal Metafunction, for mood system, the secondperson pronouns “you” and “your” occur most frequently, and then come the firstperson pronoun and third person pronouns. Present tense is used most frequently todescribe the present state, then coming past tense and future tense. In addition,declarative mood is used most widely. Next are imperative mood and interrogative mood. For modality, modal adjuncts “never”,“only”,“just”,“even” and “ever” areused frequently to add force to the discourse. Modal operators “will” and “can”appear commonly.“Will” shows promise and guarantee while “can” expressespermission.Finally, in terms of Textual Metafunction, for thematic structure: Unmarkedtheme is used more frequently than marked theme. And marked theme often appearsas temporal adjuncts, conditional adjuncts and so on. For thematic progression, thetype of thematic progression of garment advertising discourse is constant thematicpattern to stress the theme. And then are derived theme pattern and linear themepattern. Derived theme pattern is used to organize the whole text while constant themepattern and linear theme pattern occur more often in the paragraph. Besides, someadvertising discourses are too short, full of phrases, so thematic progression is notemployed.In addition, the author points out the limitations of the thesis and provides somecorresponding suggestions.