A Study On The Warning Defect Of Home Products

With the coming of industrialization era, more and more industrial productsappear in the market, but most of the warning words of the products are not sufficient orcomprehensive, and even some products have no warning words at all. This makesmany consumers unable to understand the potential dangers or side effects of theproducts, which easily causes dangers and accidents in many cases. Producers did notuse proper ways to warn consumers to beware of the potential danger and then causedaccidents or damage, namely warning defect. Warning defect is common around theworld, including China. Many legal experts in Europe and America have been aware ofthe warning defect about products and have carried on related study, and they also haveachieved some excellent results. But this problem has not aroused adequate vigilancefrom scholarship at home, few linguists have paid attention to this problem, and usetheories and methods of linguistics to analyze the warning words on warning text, sothis paper tries to fill this gap.The author selects the warning texts of three typical home products to study. Theresearch methods are the methods of textual function of systemic-functional linguistics,the specific study including the thematic structure of discourse, information structure ofdiscourse and cohesion. And the study will carry on graphic level, lexical/semantic level,syntactic level and text level.Through the observation of the warning text of many products on the market andthe study on the three cases of warning texts, the author finds that there are someproblems in the warning texts of vast majority of home products: The layout is notreasonable; important information is not prominent; the statement is too long orambiguous; discourse is not coherent. The author has found the reasons：impropersentence arrangement and semantic ambiguity, components of sentence are redundant.On the basis of the analysis, the author also revises the original text which is morecoherent and better play the communicative function of a discourse-warning effect.Lastly, it is hoped that it can draw attention of linguists, legal anthropologists andrelated legislation law enforcement, to further enrich the discourse analysis theory and help solve legal disputes caused by product warning defect.