An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese Food Advertisements

In the information age,advertisement as the medium of commodity information has penetrated into every aspect of people’s life.As one of the important commercial advertisements,food advertising language also plays an important role in people’s daily life,influencing people’s consumption choices.Advertisers interact with potential consumers through advertising language to attract consumers to buy their products.The study of food advertising language could better help us to understand how advertisers communicate with consumers through advertising language and persuade them to take action to buy products.As one of the three meta-functions of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,interpersonal functions means that people establish and maintain the relationship with others and influence others’ behaviors through verbal communication.The present research aims to answer the following three questions: 1)What are the main mood types and discursive functions in Chinese food advertisements? 2)What kinds of modal expressions can be found in Chinese food advertisements? 3)How does person system help to achieve interpersonal meaning in Chinese food advertisements?This thesis takes Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework and obtain the effective data of the 120 Chinese food advertisements collected by applying the UAM Corpus Tool,which help to analyze the realization of the interpersonal meaning from three aspects: mood system,modality system and person system.And the collection of Chinese food advertisements’ corpus is from television and official websites,which are only analyzed from the language level.Through the combination of quantitative data and qualitative analysis,it is found that the interpersonal meaning of Chinese food advertising language in mood system,modality system and person system mainly has the following characteristics:(1)In terms of mood system,Chinese food advertising language mainly uses declarative mood,followed by imperative mood and interrogative mood.The declarative mood is frequently used to inform consumers of the details of the product,while the imperative mood and interrogative mood are mainly used to attract and urge consumers to take action to buy the product.(2)In terms of modality system,Chinese food advertising language mainly uses the modal expressions of probability and inclination.These two modal expressions are skillfully used by advertisers in combination with the psychological acceptance of consumers to express their confidence in their products,increasing the credibility of the advertisements.At the same time,in the Chinese food advertising language,advertisers also use median and low value of the modal expressions to highlight the advantages of products and reflect the low compulsion and objectivity of the advertisements,which to some extent,shows the politeness to customers.(3)In terms of person system,Chinese food advertising language mostly uses the first person and the second person,while the third person is rarely used.The use of the first person is most frequent because it allows advertisers to include themselves into the consumer group,indicating that advertisers are consumer-centered and it is easier to make the consumers to accept the point of view in advertising.The use of the second person could shorten the distance between advertisers and consumers,so that both sides could form a dialogue relationship and increase the possibility of consumers buying products.The third person is more likely to use the rhetoric of personification to create the vivid image of the advertisement.Appropriate food advertising language could shorten the psychological distance between advertisers and consumers.This thesis may provide some shopping inspiration for consumers and some ideas for advertising language written by advertisers,and broaden the research scope for the application of SFG.