A Contrastive Study Of Problem-solution Pattern In Chinese And American Beauty Advertisements In Fashion Magazine

The Problem-Solution pattern, as one of the typical discourse patterns, has been explored by many researchers. Winter(1976) first proposed the four basic elements of this pattern: Situation-Problem-Response-Evaluation. Later Hoey(1983) elaborated this pattern and believed this pattern was the basic minimum discourse pattern and could be applied to many texts with different genres. Beauty advertisement, as a specific genre, has aroused researchers’ attention recent years and there are many relevant studies on it from different perspectives, but until now there isn’t much research on the contrastive analysis of beauty advertisements from the perspective of Problem-Solution pattern. Thus this thesis attempts to make a contrastive analysis of Chinese and American beauty advertisements in fashion magazine from the perspective of Problem-Solution pattern, both at the macro-level and micro-level and tries to answer the following questions:1. What are the similarities and differences of the Problem-Solution pattern in Chinese and American beauty advertisements in fashion magazine at the macro-level, i.e. from the perspective of the frequency of each element, the general pattern of the elements and the characteristics of the Problem and Response elements?2. What are the similarities and differences of the Problem-Solution pattern in Chinese and American beauty advertisements in fashion magazine at the micro-level, i.e. from the perspective of the lexical signals and clause relations?3. Why do differences of the Problem-Solution pattern exist in Chinese and American beauty advertisements in fashion magazine?In order to solve the above problems, 30 Chinese and 30 American beauty advertisements written in Problem-Solution pattern are collected from the fashion magazine, cosmopolitan, the Chinese continent version and the American version. Afterwards, the author labels the four elements of each text, analyzes the data from macro-structure and micro-structure perspective, and finally draws the following conclusions.At the macro-level, 1)as for the frequency of each element, the frequencies of Response and Evaluation are 100%, thus they are obligatory elements, while Situation and Problem are optional elements. Besides, Situation and Problem in Chinese beauty advertisements are more frequently used and therefore more important than those in American beauty advertisements; 2) as for the general pattern of the elements, the most frequently used pattern in Chinese beauty advertisements is Situation-Problem-Response-Evaluation, while in American beauty advertisements is Response-Evaluation; 3) as for the characteristics of Problem and Response, Problem sometimes appears with its “Reason” in Chinese beauty advertisements, while it appears alone in American beauty advertisements; Problem in both languages can be classified into explicit problem and implicit problem, and the implicit problem can be deduced from Response; Response in Chinese beauty advertisements is mainly composed of seven components: Origin of the product, Brand Name, Product Name, General Evaluation of the product, Ingredient of the product, Technology used in the product and Effect of the product, while in American beauty advertisements the Origin of the product and General Evaluation of the product don’t appear. Generally speaking, at least one of Brand Name and Product Name must appear in the Response element.At the micro-level, 1) as for the lexical signals, the words signaling Situation and Problem in both languages are usually negative words, derogatory words or words with negative or derogatory meaning, while the words signaling Evaluation are in most cases some positive words. The lexical signals are usually some professional words related with beautifying some parts of the body; 2) as for the clause relations, Situation and Problem in Chinese beauty advertisements are usually connected by contradiction, condition-consequence and cause-consequence, while in American beauty advertisements by contradiction and condition-consequence; Problem and Response in Chinese beauty advertisements are connected by question-response, while in American beauty advertisements by contradiction and question-response. Besides, the proportion of each kind of clause relations is different in these two languages, while the clause relations are mostly realized by lexical signals, i.e. word repetition or paraphrase.The differences of the Problem-Solution pattern in Chinese and American beauty advertisements in fashion magazine lie in the differences in thinking pattern, characteristics of Chinese and Americans and language itself.This study not only deepens the study of Problem-Solution pattern, but may also shed light on the reading and understanding of Chinese and American beauty advertisements in fashion magazine. The innovation of this study lies in its figuring out the macro-structure of Problem-Solution pattern in beauty advertisements and also working out the components and forms of Problem and Response in beauty advertisements.