| Recently, real estate industry has become the driven force to facilitate the economic growth in China. Meanwhile, real estate advertisement, as a major way to publicize real estate, is playing a more and more important role in its boom. Real estate advertisement mainly refers to advertisement published by property developers or real estate agencies with the purpose of selling or renting properties. Such kind of real estate advertisement conveys the detailed information about property, which is of great importance to potential customers. In addition, whether the real estate advertisement is attractive or not affects the sales volume of real estate directly. Therefore, real estate developers do not only need to improve the quality of the property but need to improve the language of their advertisements to create more attractive real estate advertisement. Under such circumstance, it is of necessity to conduct researches on real estate advertisement.The first kind of research is carried out by market researchers, who perform the market research and obtain feedback information while the second kind is completed by a large number of linguistic researchers who intend to improve the language of real estate advertisement to get better advertising effect. Until now, scholars generally tend to conduct researches on real estate advertisement from perspectives of rhetoric, pragmatics and stylistics while fewer researches shed light on how to improve real estate advertising language by the application of proper mood, modality and person pronouns to enhance interpersonal function in the real estate advertisement, but Halliday’s interpersonal function gives us enlightment.In Halliday’s systemic functional grammar(SFG), he proposes three meta-functions, which are ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Interpersonal function, also interpersonal meaning, emphasizes the personal function brought by language, deeming that by language, the addresser gets him involved in a context in which he can express his attitude and inference and finally alters others’ attitude and behavior. The theory of interpersonal meaning broadens the scope of practical discourse analysis, and particularly suits for the research on advertising discourse.The thesis regards the interpersonal meaning as its theory, selecting30pieces of Chinese and30pieces of American real estate advertisements which are from several leading real estate companies located in six major cities in China and a well-known real estate company, Ryland Homes in America. Based on the samples, the author tries to make a comparative study from the perspective of interpersonal meaning within the domain of systemic functional grammar of Halliday. During the analyzing process, qualitative and quantitative methods will be adopted to find the similarities and differences in the realization of mood, modality and person system.After the analysis, we find the similarities between Chinese and American real estate advertisements in the realization of interpersonal meaning:(1) From the perspective of mood, declarative clauses are frequently used to pass information to potential customers while imperatives are commonly used to demand action.(2)From the perspective of modality, the application of probability is at a rather high percent in both Chinese and American real estate advertisements and advertisers all use expressions of obligation to express their weak demand for potential customers to purchase.(3) As to the application of person pronouns, the second pronoun is employed at the highest frequency, and the first person pronoun generally appears with plural form. Besides, the interaction between the first and second pronouns plays a vital role in the realization of interpersonal meaning. Nevertheless, there are still considerable differences between Chinese and American real estate advertisements in the realization of interpersonal meaning:(1)As referred to mood system, Chinese real estate advertisement adopts more exclamatives while American real estate advertisement employs more imperatives.(2)From the perspective of modality, Chinese real estate advertisement adopts less expressions of probability but a considerable expressions of usuality which do not appear in American real estate advertisement. Meanwhile, in Chinese real estate advertisement, expressions of obligation are more than those in American real estate advertisement.(3) Chinese real estate advertisement uses "您" more in the second person pronoun while there is no such expression in American real estate advertisement. In addition, in Chinese real estate advertisement, the plural form "we" can refer to advertisers, potential customers, potential customers and advertisers while "we" generally refers to advertisers in American real estate advertisement.Halliday’s SFG also admits the social-cultural influence on language; therefore, the author will analyze the cultural and language factors resulting in the differences in the real estate advertisements in two countries. |
PDF Full Text Request