A Study On English Web Advertising Texts From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Function

Transcending the limitation of space and running at low costs but a high speed,E-commerce,as an emerging industry,enjoys a wide acceptance across the world.As the world is more connected than ever,China also sees a rapid development in its cross-border E-commerce industry in recent years.Usually,in online shopping,products are presented with an advertising text on a web page,which serves to supply product information and prompt customers to make a purchase.This is related to the interpersonal function of language in Halliday's systemic functional grammar.Based on this,the present paper will examine how interpersonal function is realized in English web advertising texts and how it plays a role in helping persuade customers into buying products.Few studies on web advertising texts are found.And of those available ones,studies focusing on interpersonal function usually take qualitative method to analyze a limited number of samples,or the research scopes are confined to only one item category.In studies using quantitative method,data are always processed as a whole.The present paper differs from them in two ways.First,the research scope is extended to cover all the item categories on a shopping website to see how interpersonal function is realized from an overall view.Second,data in the present paper are processed on a sample-basis,so the distinctive feature of each sample will be kept rather than being hidden by the general pattern.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted and altogether 130 samples are collected from Amazon.com.They are examined from two aspects,mood and modality,based on Halliday's interpersonal function theory.And the findings are as follows:(1)Of the samples collected,most of them mainly consist of declaratives and imperatives together.10 samples only consist of declaratives and 1 sample only of imperatives.Interrogatives exist in about half of the samples.(2)Within each sample,declaratives usually make up about 40% to 100% of the text,while imperatives usually account for less than 50%.Interrogatives appear least frequently,account for less than 30% of the text.(3)Most samples use interactant subjects and non-interactant subjects together,while 1 sample uses non-interactant subjects and 3 samples use interactant subjects only.Generally,interactant subjects make up as much a text as non-interactant subjects do.(4)Within interactant subjects,you and nouns modified by your are used in the most number of samples and are used at the highest frequency in most samples.We and nouns modified by our are used in about half of the samples,while I and nouns modified by my are rarely adopted.They are found in only 7 samples.(5)Can and will appear at a way higher frequency than other modal operators and can is more often used than will.Besides,high-value modal operators are rarely used.(6)Among interpersonal adjuncts,adjuncts of counterexpectancy,e.g.just,even,only,and temporality,e.g.always and never are used most frequently.Then combining the features of web advertising texts,an analysis from the perspective of speech function and semantics is given to explain how interpersonal function is realized through mood and modality in web advertising texts and why it is realized in the way the research results present.