A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In English Food Advertising Discourse

In human communication, people may express their subjective judgments orattitudes towards the things, elicit or change others’ views or attitudes, and influenceothers’ behaviors in interaction. The language use in the communication processreflects and influences the roles and relationships. Such is what is meant byinterpersonal meaning. We can observe a popular trend to apply systemic functionalgrammar to study the interpersonal meaning in different types of discourses.Food advertising discourse is employed by the advertiser as an intermediary tointeract with potential consumers, with the purpose of promoting sales through thelanguage appeal strategy. At present, there has been a rich body of studies of theinterpersonal meaning in various advertising discourse, but rarely in English foodadvertising discourse. Previous researches on English food advertisements are mainlyconducted from such dimensions as dialogism, adaptation theory and intertextuality,while few are from the perspective of interpersonal meaning. The present study takesthe systemic functional grammar approach to analyze the interpersonal meaning inEnglish food advertising from the aspects of mood, modality, person system, andappraisal system.Through the discourse analysis, the thesis aims to find out the languagecharacteristics of English food advertising discourse and how the interpersonalmeaning is realized to construe appropriate social relation between the advertiser andpotential consumers. The researches and discussions are concerned with the followingquestions:(1) How is the interpersonal meaning realized in English food advertisingdiscourse?(2) What are the language characteristics of English food advertising discourse?The present study adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to studythe English food advertisements. The data for this thesis are40English foodadvertisements randomly collected from well-known magazines, newspapers andinternet.The major findings of the research are as follows:1) food advertisers prefer togive information rather than demand action from potential consumers by employingdifferent mood structures, especially declarative mood structures;2) modality is usedto express advertiser’ attitude and confidence in their products, and high frequency ofprobability helps to maintain solidarity between advertisers and potential consumers;3)various uses of personal pronouns help to reinforce the interaction and negotiationbetween them;4) appraisal resources in the discourse are used to establish andmaintain interactive and dialogic relation with potential consumers so as to arousetheir purchasing desire.This thesis enriches the previous interpersonal meaning study on advertisingdiscourse and has proved that systemic functional grammar is workable and useful in discourse analysis. Apart from that, for the practical purpose, through scrutinizingsuccessful English food advertisements, it may offer some illumination toadvertisement writing, particularly English food advertisement writing, as well as theidentification of the facticity of the food advertisements.