A Critical Discourse Analysis On Public Service Advertising

Contemporarily, advertisements have entered our modern life withoutexpectation and affected people’s attitudes and values constantly. There are twosubdivisions of ads due to their purposes: commercial ads and public service ads(PSAs for short). Lots of attention is paid to the researches of the former, and littleconcern at home and abroad is conducted to the latter. What’s more, researches areprimarily carried out with plenty of approaches from aesthetics, psychology,linguistics, and sociology. Main concerns of these studies are laid on verbal level,conducting the features on the lexical, grammatical, stylistic, rhetoric levels, etc.Nevertheless, in the age of globalization, these cannot explain the deep meaninghidden in them. Thus, from CDA, a new angle, this thesis is made to implement amore thorough analysis of PSAs.This thesis holds that PSAs, just like any other discourses, are never aninstrument delivering information in an indifferent way, but with ideology involvedin them. Thus, this study aims first to provide a theoretical background andmethodology for the analysis of ideologies in PSAs from modality, personal system,and transitivity, and conduct the usage characteristics of the above three. Secondly,combined with quantity and quality methods, this thesis adhibits the methodology tofifty PSA discourses selected at random to inspect how they convey ideology via theapplication of language. In order to conduct the study, this thesis has to render theanswer to the questions as follows:(1) What is the distribution of modality, personal system and transitivity in PSAdiscourses?(2) How is the function of public service advertising towards target audiencerealized in the form of modality, personal system and transitivity?(3) What is the relationship between language, ideology and power in PSAdiscourses?First of all, this thesis analyzes the distribution of modality, personal system andtransitivity in PSAs from the macro perspective, finding that as for modality,Modalization is more widely applied in PSAs than Modulation; as for personal system, the percentage of the first personal pronoun is larger than that of the second,leaving the third person the least; as for transitivity, the material process is the mostcommon, with rational and mental processes following, and the existential one takesthe minimum portion.What’s more, PSAs take effect through the choice of language, and thus, thepersuasiveness is achieved. From modality, no explicit modality means the absenceof metaphorical modality in that as for the target audience, metaphorical modalityneeds more efforts to comprehend and it can obscure the source of modality, whichwill do harm to the acceptance of ads. From the personal system, it is easier for thefirst personal system to create an intimate relation between addresser and addressee,which will make the audience accept the information and ideology without conflictand notice. Because of the exophoric nature of the second person, it can eitherrepresent the people in the PSAs or the addressees themselves. From transitivity, themost-used material process is to describe the backgound and the following relationalprocess is to render detailed messages about the potic or the subject. These twoprocesses portray a overall picture for the audience to be immersive and showempathy. The mental process is the description of emotion to arouse the innersympathy and positive action of addressee.Last but not least, this thesis finds out that there exists a special relation betweenlanguage, power and ideology. The addoption of modalization makes it easier for thetarget class to accept and understand the literal messages conveyed by ads in order toarouse the interests. The slather of the first and second personal pronouns shortensboth the psychological and spacial distance between publishers and readers. It seemsthat they communicate in a face-to-face way, but actually it is the former whooutmatch the latter, and pour out their own ideologies in an unexchangable role. Andthe choice of transitivity reflects the objectivity of PSAs and it symbolizes the powerof addresser as well.