Contrastive Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In English And Chinese Food Advertising Discourses

With the improvement of living condition and strengthen of health awareness, peoplebegin focus more attention on food. Food advertisements that increasingly appear inmagazines and newspapers attract more people’s attention. Advertisers offer potentialcustomers the latest information about products and services and then persuade them intobuying the products and services. Studies on all kinds of advertisement have been conductedfrom many aspects.Appraisal Theory was put forward by the Australia linguist James Martin based onHalliday’s interpersonal meta-function. Appraisal Theory is used to describe and explainlanguage users how to use Appraisal language to express Attitude, Judgment, andAppreciation towards target things, and interact with hearers and finally achieve the purposeof persuasion. With the development of Appraisal theory, application of this theory mainlyfocuses on English discourses, while the application to Chinese discourses is still rare. Amongprevious studies on advertisements, few analyses on food advertisements, especially thecontrastive analyses between Chinese and English, are from the perspective of AppraisalTheory. This study analyzes the distribution of Appraisal resource of Chinese and Englishtexts, especially the contrastive analyses of Attitude resources from lexical level which tries toshed light on the translation and creation of food advertisements.This thesis will be carried out on a corpus of40foods advertising.20English foodsadvertising are mainly selected from the influential magazines in America Reader’s Digest,Business Weekly.20Chinese foods advertising discourses are selected from the famousmagazine China Advertising. The author form a corpus based on these40food advertisements,then identify and mark the Appraisal resources with the guidance of Appraisal System. Themajor findings are as follows:First, both Chinese and English food advertising discourses contains abundant appraisalresources. Second, the distribution of appraisal resources is not well-proportional both inChinese and in English food advertising. Among the three subsystem of appraisal system,Attitude system comprises a large proportion, while the engagement and graduation systemtake up a small percentage. Third, both Chinese and English food advertising discourse preferto use positive appraisal resources to evaluate their product or service so that consumers aremore easily attracted by their product or service. However, there also exist some differencesbetween these two kinds of ads: first, within the attitude system, more effect and judgmentresources are employed in Chinese food advertising discourses than that in the English foodadvertising discourses while more appreciation resource are employed in English advertising discourses than that in Chinese food advertising discourses. Second, within the judgmentsystem, social esteem resources in Chinese food advertising discourses are more than that inEnglish food advertising discourses.