The Comparative Study Of Attitudinal Resources In English And Chinese Public Service Advertisements Of Traffic Safety: An Appraisal Theory Approach

Public service advertisement is a kind of non-commercial advertisement, which serves the public interests, aims at promoting the public interests, arouses people’s attention to various social issues and appeals to them to modify and solve the problems. Therefore, public service advertisement plays a more and more important role in people’s daily life. So far, most scholars have studied public service advertisements from the perspective of psychology, pragmatics and sociology. This paper studies English and Chinese public service advertisement of traffic safety from the perspective of attitudinal resources of Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory is a development and complement to the interpersonal function in systemic-functional grammar, which focuses on the semantics of evaluation. This paper makes the comparative study of attitudinal resources in English and Chinese public service advertisement of traffic safety from the perspective of Appraisal Theory, which aims to find out the similarities and differences in the distribution and realization of attitudinal resources between them. Finally, this paper attempts to explore the reasons for the similarities and differences.This paper collects 50 English and Chinese public service advertisements of traffic safety for each. English public service advertisements of traffic safety are selected from Ad Council. Chinese public service advertisements of traffic safety are mainly collected from CCTV, its blog and network of Chinese public service advertisement. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative method is used to illustrate the distribution of attitudinal resources in both English and Chinese public service advertisement of traffic safety; the qualitative method deals with comparison of similarities and differences in the use of attitudinal resources, and explains the reasons for the similarities and differences between them. With the help of UAM Corpus Tool, this paper generates the frequency of occurrences of attitudinal resources in English and Chinese public service advertisement of traffic safety and makes chi-square tests in each group of the statistics to analyze the similarities and differences.By the comparative analysis, it shows that there are some similarities and differences in the realization of attitudinal resources in English and Chinese public service advertisements of traffic safety. Generally speaking, both of them adopt a large number of attitudinal resources. However, there are still more attitudinal resources in Chinese public service advertising than those in English public service advertisements. On the one hand, there exist the following similarities:(1) The realization of attitudinal resources are mainly by means of affect and judgment resources;(2) “Capacity” resource is the most frequent judgment resource used in EPSA and CPSA of traffic safety;(3) The capacity resources “can” and “能”, which are most frequently used in EPSA and CPSA of traffic safety, have the same function.On the other hand, there exist some significant differences as follows:(1) English public service advertisement of traffic safety is inclined to adopt more judgment resources, while Chinese public service advertisement of traffic safety tends to employ more affect resources;(2) the difference in the realization of appreciation resources;(3) EPSA of traffic safety adopts more valuation resources than reaction resources, while CPSA of traffic safety adopts more reaction resources than valuation resources.Finally, in terms of the reasons for the similarities and differences, the reasons for the similarities are:(1) Being the same kind of public service advertisement, English and Chinese public service advertisements of traffic safety share the same nature and purpose of attempting to stimulate corrective actions on traffic safety problems;(2) It arises from people’s responsibility for examining themselves to obey traffic rules and supervising people around them not to violate traffic rules.The reasons for the differences between them are:(1) different value dimensions: individualism and collectivism;(2) different cultural context: low-context and high-context;(3) different means of expression: direct and indirect;(4) EPSA of traffic safety stresses sense but not sensibility, it tends to persuade the readers by describing the realistic things, such as the horrible accident scenes, and some outcomes of violating traffic safety, etc.,while CPSA of traffic safety employs more emotional expressions in order to more easily attract and move readers to obey traffic safety.After the comparative analysis of attitudinal resources in English and Chinese public service advertisements of traffic safety, this paper clearly shows the similarities and differences in the distribution and realization of attitudinal resources between them and attempts to explore the reasons for the similarities and differences. This study helps to the translation and publicity of English and Chinese public service advertisements of traffic safety. At the same time, it also plays a vital role in cross-cultural communication.