A Comparative Study Of Appraisal Resources In English And Chinese Public Service Advertising

Public service advertising is a kind of non-commercial advertising, which servesthe public and aims to publicize some public welfare concepts in an advocating orwarning way. In other words, public service advertising helps promote the constructionof a civilized society. Therefore, public service advertising plays an indispensable rolein public welfare. So far, most scholars have studied public service advertising from theperspective of psychology, sociology and pragmatics. This thesis studies public serviceadvertising from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory is acomplementation to the interpersonal function in systemic-functional grammar, whichfocuses on the semantics of evaluation. Based on the framework of Appraisal Theory,this thesis makes a tentative study of appraisal resources in English and Chinese publicservice advertising, aiming to find out the similarities and differences in the realizationof attitude, engagement and graduation between them.This study adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches and makes ananalysis of English and Chinese public service advertising. By the employment of UAMCorpus Tool and SPSS, this study annotates appraisal resources and makes chi-squaretests in each group of the statistics. At the same time, it carries out a qualitative studybased on Appraisal Theory and makes explanations for the existence of similarities anddifferences. This study establishes two corpora, which consist of100English andChinese public service advertising for each. English public service advertising isselected from famous and influential magazines and newspapers: New York Time, The Week, and Time, The Times. Chinese public service advertising mainly comes fromCCTV and network of Chinese public service advertising.After a detailed comparative analysis, it shows that there are some similaritiesand differences in the realization of appraisal resources in English and Chinese publicservice advertising. Generally speaking, both of them adopt a large number of appraisalresources. However, there are more appraisal resources in English public serviceadvertising than those in Chinese public service advertising. On one hand, they sharesome similarities:1) in attitude system, both of them employ the same judgementresources;2) in engagement system, the distribution of dialogic-contraction is more orless the same, with most of dialogic-contraction resources realized through disclaim;3)in graduation system, the distribution of force and focus is the same, and both of themadopt more force resources. On the other hand, there are some remarkable differencesbetween them:1) in attitude system, Chinese public service advertising prefers to adoptmore affect resources, while English public service advertising is inclined to employmore appreciation resources;2) in engagement system, Chinese public serviceadvertising adopts both entertain and attribute resources, while English public serviceadvertising only employs entertain resources;3) in graduation resources, the number ofintensification and quantification resources in Chinese public service advertising ismore or less the same, while English public service advertising adopts moreintensification resources and few quantification resources.By making a comparative study on appraisal resources in Chinese and Englishpublic service advertising, it clearly depicts the similarities and differences in the realization of appraisal resources in terms of emotions and interpersonal meanings inEnglish and Chinese public service advertising. This study contributes to the publicityand translation of English and Chinese public service advertising, at the same time, itplays a significant role in cross-culture communication.