A Contrastive Study On Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And English Cosmetics Advertising Texts

With the development of commodity economy, the advertisement has become animportant strategy to publicize the products. In the cosmetics propaganda, theadvertisement also is important. The words used in the cosmetics advertisementsrealize the interaction between the advertisers and consumers. So through the analysisof the interpersonal meaning in the cosmetics advertisements, we can find out howadvertisers can communicate with the consumers effectively and finally persuadethem to purchase the cosmetics by the use of advertisements.Since Leech describes the characteristics of advertisements, the researches aboutadvertisement start to emerge in large number. But from the literature review, we cansee that many researches study advertising from one certain aspect. There are rareones that are about the comprehensive study about advertisement.As one of the three metafunctions of systemic functional grammar, interpersonalfunction not only refers to the function that people can use language to establish andmaintain interpersonal relationship but also to influence others‘action. With thesupport of Halliday‘s systemic functional grammar and Thompson and Li Zhanzi‘sextended theory about interpersonal meaning, this thesis studies the similarities anddifferences on the interpersonal meaning of fifty Chinese and fifty English cosmeticsadvertisements from the perspectives of mood, modality, person and evaluationsystem and concludes the similarity and difference between them.Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis about the selectedadvertisements, the thesis concludes the similarity and difference. Through theanalysis of mood system, the declarative mood which plays the function ofinformation-giving takes the largest percentage. There is more exclamative mood inChinese than in English. From the aspect of modality, both Chinese and Englishcosmetics tend to use more low value modal operators while the high value ones areless used. Chinese cosmetics use modal adjuncts more frequently than English. Interms of person system, all three person pronouns are used in both Chinese andEnglish cosmetics ads. But the English cosmetics ads use more person pronouns thanChinese especially in the third person. In the system of evaluation, both Chinese andEnglish cosmetics ads intend to use words which have the positive meaning to describe the quality and function of the cosmetics.This thesis provides a new perspective for the comparative study of Chinese andEnglish cosmetics adds with the support of Halliday‘s systemic-functional grammar. Itmay bring some implication to the cosmetics ads writing and some advice to theadvertisers who want to promote their products in the market. And this thesis also cangive some implication to foreign language teaching.