A Contrastive Study Of Mood In English And Chinese Tourist Advertisements

The essential role mood plays in realizing the interpersonal metafunction has long beenrecognized. Tourist advertisement provides a good example for the study of how mood is usedto establish and maintain good relationship between the addresser and addressee, and thus toinfluence the potential visitors minds and behaviors. Under the framework of HallidayanSystematic Functional Grammar (SFG), this study made a contrast on mood system betweenEnglish tourist advertisements (TA) and Chinese tourist advertisements (TA). It aimed toinvestigate how mood is used and to what extent mood is realized differently in English andChinese TA.This study was designed to answer the following three research questions:(1) How ismood realized in English and Chinese tourist advertisements at syntactic level?(2) How ismood realized in English and Chinese tourist advertisements at lexical level?(3) How isMood realized by personal pronouns of the subject in English and Chinese touristadvertisements? Both quantitative and qualitative designs were adopted in the analysis of30English and30Chinese tourist advertisements selected randomly from well-known touristwebsites at home and abroad. After the data was obtained, frequencies and percentages ofmood realizations at different levels were counted and calculated. Then SPSS software wasemployed to see whether there would be significant differences between English and ChineseTA on mood.The findings are as follows. Firstly, at syntactic level, the significant difference lies in thefrequencies of imperatives; English tourist advertisements use more imperative clauses thanChinese advertisements; however, there is no significant difference between English andChinese TA in the utilization of declaratives and interrogatives. Secondly, at lexical level, thesignificant difference is in the use of modal operator. English modal operators are used morewidely than Chinese ones. Thirdly, in terms of personal pronouns, the dramatic differenceconsists in the frequencies of second person pronouns; in English tourist advertisements,second person pronouns are used more frequently than in Chinese, while the employment offirst person and third person pronouns are not significantly different between the twolanguages. The results demonstrate striking differences as well as similarities between English andChinese TA on mood. The similarities show that English and Chinese tourist advertisementshave common interpersonal function of achieving more active and effective communication,while the differences remind us of the effects of cultural factors on language use.