| People’s life is bombarded with penetrating advertisements whichappear any where and any time. These advertisements convey informationto potential customers and try to induce them to buy the products. It isonly natural that human beings take a fancy for beauty. As special products,cosmetics have been favored by more and more women, and have been theconcern of many female consumers for its beautiful pictures and attractivestatements. In recent years, many scholars from home and abroad havestudied cosmetic advertising from different angles, but most of them justfocus on the surface characteristics of its language. Few scholars studythe macro-structure and interpersonal meaning of cosmetic advertising.Thus, this thesis conducts a more comprehensive study on it. As for themacro-structure of cosmetic advertising, this thesis adopts Hasan’s (1985)theory of genre as the theoretical framework, and tries to work out theGeneric Structure Potential (GSP) of it; as for the interpersonal meaningof cosmetic advertising, the study takes metadiscourse as anrepresentative, and tries to work out the kind of metadiscourse thatEnglish Cosmetic Advertising has and the distribution of metadiscoursein different elements of the advertising structure. Therefore, thisthesis works on a comprehensive and systematic study of English CosmeticAdvertising from the perspective of genre and metadiscourse.This study chooses50ads from Cosmopolitan; Vogue and Elle randomly.It adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods so as tofigure out the following questions:1) What is the GSP of English CosmeticAdvertising?2) How is metadiscourse distributed in English CosmeticAdvertising?3) Why does this distribution contribute to thepersuasiveness of advertising? Or, in other words, why do differentelements of the structure prefer different devices of metadiscourse?Firstly, this thesis works out the genre of English CosmeticAdvertising and finds that the structure elements contained in English Cosmetic Advertising are: arousing attention (AA); establishingcredentials (EC); introducing detailed information (IDI); Commitment orEndorsement (C/E); offering additional instruction (OAI); urging actions(UA) and slogans (S). Among them, element AA, IDI and UA are obligatory,and element EC, C/E, OAI and S are optional. Then the study figures outthe GSP of English Cosmetic Advertising. Element AA must occur at thebeginning of the Cosmetic Advertising. Element IDI must appear after AAand before UA. IDI can occur more than once. Element UA can occur anywhere,as long as it does not precede IDI.Secondly, from the perspective of metadiscourse, the study finds thatEnglish Cosmetic Advertising employs many kinds of metadiscourse devices,including: transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials,hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self mentions, and engagement markers.Among them, the most frequently used ones are engagement markers,transitions and evidentials.Thirdly, this thesis finds out that in different element of theadvertising structure, copywriters have some preferences in choosing thekind of metadiscourse resources. Engagement markers play a significantrole in calling customers’ attention and involving them in interactingwith copywriters and urging them to take actions. |
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