| Public service advertisement(PSA for short) is a kind of non-profit advertisement whose aim is to benefit the public interest, by raising public awareness of an issue, affecting public attitudes, and potentially stimulating action. The most important role of the public service advertisement is that it can be viewed as an effective way to solve social problems. Since it can influence the public with the correct behaviors and concepts and thus encourage the public to act correctly in accordance with the social changes.The Appraisal Theory which is the new development of the Systemic Functional Grammar was put forward by J.R.Martin. Its core is the “system” and its focus is “Appraisal”. There are three systems within Appraisal Theory: the Attitude system which concerns the feelings and emotions; the Engagement system which concerns sourcing attitudes; and the Graduation system which concerns with amplified feelings and blurred categories. Each system has its own subsystem. The Appraisal Theory has been used to analyze discourse of various texts. In this thesis, the author focuses on the core system--the Attitude system to find the distributions of affect resources, judgment resources and appreciation resources in the “No Smoking” public service advertisements in English and Chinese. This research is trying to come up with the similarities and differences between them.The author has picked 50 pieces of “No Smoking” public service advertisements in English and Chinese respectively to set up a corpus. All of the advertisements are chosen from the authentic websites, magazines or TV stations, such as Times, CCTV, YOUTUBE and so on. This research is trying to answer the following three questions:(1) How are attitude resources distributed in the “No Smoking” advertisements in English and Chinese respectively?(2) What kind of effects are the attitude resources achieved in the “No Smoking” PSA texts?(3) What are the differences between Chinese and English “No Smoking” advertisements in their language features?With the help of SPSS and after a quantitative and qualitative analysis the researcher finds that:(1) In English, the affect resources take up 59%, appreciation resources take up 30% and the judgment resources take up 11%. While in Chinese, affect resources occupy 43%, the judgment resources occupy 31% and the appreciation resources occupy 26%. The different distributions can attribute to the different cultural values of the two languages.(2) The advertisers use affect resources to shorten the distance between them and the readers. The judgment resources are used to persuade people to give up smoking from the social aspect. And the appreciation resources are applied to describe smoking itself or other things that related to smoking. The advertisers just stand at a third person’s point and give some suggestions which seem to be objective.(3) It is not difficult to find that in English, there is an apparent distribution of these three categories, but in Chinese, the changes are not so sharply. For Chinese people, they advocate beautiful things, emotions, feelings and so on, and try their best to avoid the ugly aspect of the things. That is why Chinese public service advertisers use more positive attitudes than the negative one. While English people dare to face the ugly aspect of life, so they have a clear attitude to what they love and what they hate. That is why in their language, the negative attitude is overweight the positive one. |
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