A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Public Service Advertisements: A Discursive Practice Approach

In current society, advertisements have flooded into our mind and life; as a result, they affect our attitude and behavior. According to different aims, advertisements can be divided into commercial advertisements and public service advertisements. Commercial advertisements possess the nature of marketing, because of which, they have attracted the eyes of plenty of scholars to study from different perspectives. The bloom of public service advertisement is far later than commercial ones; the attention paid to the public service advertisements is much less than that to the commercial advertisements. Moreover, the existing analysis on the public service advertisement is only from the angle of aesthetics,cross-cultural studies, communication, advertising, systemic- functional grammar, and sociology. Most scholars focus more on the text analysis or its features of development, and all of them only study the technique of using words and the function of language, but they didn’t analyze how public service advertisements inspire the public to take action as it advocates. Thus, this thesis will apply the discursive practice approach to analyze the discourse of public service advertisements from a new perspective, the critical discourse analysis, to illustrate the deep meaning hidden in them.Public service advertisements serve the public benefit without the aim of perusing the profit. They raise public attention to social problems and appeal to improve the condition.This thesis is based on Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Framework, applying the discursive practice approach to analyze the mood, personal system, modality, transitivity,order of discourse of the public service advertisements. The method applied is the qualitative research. The data, which are all in Chinese, are chosen from the China CentralTelevision---Chinese Public Service Advertising Network. They are collected from the highest 40 in attention rate to ensure accuracy of the study.This thesis will begin by illustrating Fairclough’s Three---Dimensional Framework,Systemic---Functional Grammar. The author then focus on the discursive practice approach for discourse analysis based upon a view of discourse practice as a mediation linking text and social practice. The next section makes an interactional analysis including mood,personal system, modality, transitivity system. Finally, through the study of the order of discourse the thesis is to explore how the persuasion of public service advertisements achieved.