A Comparative Analysis Of Textual Function Of Language Variation In Chinese And English Advertisements

Halliday, a functional linguist, put forward the theory of three metafunctions of language: interpersonal function, ideational function and textual function. Textual function relates to the construction of text of language. It refers to how people organize the information that they want to express into a coherent text while using language. Language variation is a kind of phenomenon of language deviation which presents itself in the emergence of new words, new meanings, and new expressions with the development of society and science and technology and in catering to the need of communication. As an important way of attracting people, language variation is common in advertising discourse. The existing studies focus either on its textual function or on its language variation, and the research on the textual function of language variation of advertisement has not been found.This thesis mainly applies the textual function theory of Halliday, with the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, to contrastively analyze the function of language variation in English and Chinese advertisements in terms of thematic structures, information structures, and cohesive system, from the aspects of sound variation, lexical variation and grammatical variation.The study shows that language variation is more common in Chinese advertisements than in English advertisements, and sound variation is more common in Chinese advertisements but lexical variation is more common in English advertisements. In the thematic structure of advertising language, simple Theme is used more frequently than multiple Theme; in multiple Theme, most of the deviated elements are conceptual elements; as for the markedness of Theme in English and Chinese discourse, deviation is more common in marked Theme than in unmarked Theme. In cohesive mechanism, there is more implicit cohesion than explicit cohesion, and implicit cohesion is usually represented by cultural context and the violation of cooperative principle; in explicit cohesion, reference and omission in grammatical cohesion and antonyms and repetition in lexical cohesion are mainly adopted. As for the relationship between information structure and thematic structure, both Chinese and English advertising usually take the name of products as Theme as given information and Rheme is the new information, which is the “new information+given information” structure.The comparative study of textual function of language variation in English and Chinese advertisements not only can help us understand the similarities and differences, but also have a better understanding of the connotation and the creative intention of advertisements.