A Study Of English Public Service Advertisements On Environmental Protection From The Perspective Of Register Theory

With environmental problems becoming increasingly severe,environmental protection and sustainable development have become two issues of our times.English public service advertisements(PSAs)on environmental protection are of great help to improve the public's morality and behavior norms,consequently,making great contributions to the solution of environmental issues.Constructed by textual mode and visual mode,the static English Pro-environmental PSAs are multimodal discourses.In the previous studies,scholars primarily gave priority to the study on literal mode of English Pro-environmental PSAs on the basis of mass media,aesthetics etc.Few scholars made relevant studies on English Pro-environmental PSAs to explore the function of these PSAs systematically from the perspective of linguistics.Register Theory highlights the functional variety of language.Halliday(1978)held the view that Register Theory was composed of three variables of context of situation,namely field of discourse,tenor of discourse and mode of discourse.Moreover,Register Theory would determine three meta-functions of language,and in turn,the three variables of Register Theory could be realized through the meta-functions of language.Currently,Register Theory has been extensively applied to other fields,such as discourse analysis,translation,foreign language teaching,and the like,nevertheless,it is seldom applied to the analysis of English Pro-environmental PSAs.Owing to special functions and specific register features,English Pro-environmental PSAs are a special register.Armed with the description above,this study has explored register features of English Pro-environmental PSAs,the realization forms of the three variables of Register Theory,and the meta-functions of English Pro-environmental PSAs by analyzing 107 online English Pro-environmental PSAs on the basis of both the quantitative and qualitative methods from the perspective of Register Theory.Research results manifest that,first of all,through the analysis of field of English Pro-environmental PSAs,the author has discovered that setting and subject matter are two important register features related to field in the discourses of EnglishPro-environmental PSAs.Moreover field and ideational function of the English Pro-environmental PSAs can be realized through the six processes in transitivity system.After an analysis of tenor,another significant finding demonstrates that characteristics of participants and their relationship are two core register features concerned with tenor in the discourses of English Pro-environmental PSAs.What's more,mood system,modality system and person system can be feasibly used to analyze textual mode of English Pro-environmental PSAs,while they can't be employed to direct the analysis of visual mode of Pro-environmental PSAs.Tenor and the interpersonal function in textual part of English Pro-environmental PSAs can be realized by means of the mood system,the modality system and the person system.Tenor and interpersonal meaning in image part of English Pro-environmental PSAs are realized by two speech roles: giving and demanding.After an analysis of mode,the author arrives at her last discovery.The main communication medium adopted in English Pro-environmental PSAs is in its written form which is primarily used to be read.Moreover,in order to make information focus stand out,certain rhetoric modes,such as synecdoche,personification are applied in the collected English Pro-environmental PSAs.Additionally,the realization forms of mode and textual function of English Pro-environmental PSAs can be revealed by analyzing the left and right information structure and the top and bottom information structure.The application of Register Theory to the analysis of discourses of English Pro-environmental PSAs is to expand the application scope of the Register Theory,and to provide one aspect for the analysis of visual mode to some extent.What's more,armed with the analysis in this thesis,it is confirmed that Register Theory provides a feasible way to the analysis of discourses of English Pro-environmental PSAs.Finally this thesis is also to enrich the approaches to interpret the functions of English Pro-environmental PSAs.