Interpreting Linguistic Effects Of International Cosmetics Advertising From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

Nowadays, advertisement bears close relationship with our daily lives and is also a highly persuasive text with a definite purpose. In order to attract customers and persuade them to take purchase action eventually, the advertisers usually use various linguistic devices to polish their advertisements. With great success, international well-known cosmetics, not only take up a large proportion in China’s cosmetics market, but also arouse the interest of scholars by their outstanding and refreshing advertising language. Recent decades have seen numerous researches into English cosmetics advertisements from various perspectives such as rhetoric, textual function, and pragmatics etc.Grammatical Metaphor is proposed by M.A.K. Halliday in his An Introduction to Functional Grammar, and he points out that grammatical metaphor is a metaphorical expression of a meaning through lexical-grammatical form and corresponding to it, the congruent form is the most primitive lexical-grammatical one to express direct meaning. After decades of development, scholars begin to put the theory into practice, analyzing different kinds of discourses, such as technical discourses, news reports, legal documents and advertising etc, but not into the research of the branch of advertising, that is, cosmetics advertising,Therefore, based on the research status discussed above, the author tries to apply the grammatical metaphor theory to analyzing international well-known English cosmetics advertisements. And this thesis attempts to analyze the GM phenomenon in English cosmetics advertising so as to reveal the realization form of GM and explores the linguistic effects achieved by grammatical metaphor in international well-known cosmetics advertising.Based on the analysis of the English cosmetics advertisements collected from multiple channels, the author finds the application of nominalization, adjectivalization,verbalization, metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality can achieve multiple linguistic effects, including increasing lexical density, enhancing credibility, increasing objectivity etc. This thesis aims at offering a new perspective for English cosmetics advertising research and providing references for the design of English cosmetics adverting language. Thus, this research is of theoretical and practical significance.