An Analysis Of Realization Of Interpersonal Meaning In Advertising Texts From Official Websites Of U.S.Commercial Education Companies

In the 21^stcentury,education and communication skills are indispensable for success.Education has received unprecedented attention.These decades have witnessed the commercialization of education with more and more education companies springing up,making education a kind of“product”or“service”in the market.Therefore,advertising of education products,an important strategy,is playing such a necessary and important role that it cannot afford to be underestimated.Effective interaction with consumers through advertising language can exert great influence on their growth.The education industry in U.S.boasts a greater influence and have developed to be relatively mature,making it a representative research object.Advertising texts of U.S.education companies contain strategies and ideas of communication,conforming to the meta-function of interpersonal meaning of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar.However,few have studied advertising texts of profit-making American education companies under the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar.Moreover,most scholars studying interpersonal meaning did not explore reasons from cultural perspective,especially from marketing perspective.Lastly,among the studies on interpersonal meaning,most did not employ corpus tools.Given all these,we will employ UAM Corpus Tool to process and analyze data from aspects of mood,modality and attitude system to study how U.S.education companies realize interpersonal meaning.Exploration for reasons from 7Ps Marketing Theory and Hofstede’s Cultural Dimension Theory will be held.From these aspects,this research has great academic significance.From official websites of four representative American education companies,114advertising texts are collected and analyzed through UAM Corpus Tool.The main findings are as follows:（1）In mood system,declaratives are the dominant mood type while interrogatives are least employed.The frequencies of imperatives and exclamatives are similar.（2）In modality system,medium value resources have the largest proportion,accounting for more than half of all modal operators,being followed by low value and high value operators.（3）In attitude system,appreciation resources appear most frequently in UEA discourse,being followed by judgement and affect resources.As for the reasons,（1）people in U.S.still tend to avoid uncertain information to a certain extent while declaratives can directly provide clear information,leading to the largest proportion.（2）From the cultural dimension of Power Distance,educational companies and consumers are not on a completely equal position.Therefore,to show appropriate confidence,advertisers use medium modality resources most frequently.（3）From 7Ps Marketing Theory,the attitudinal resources basically center on marketing elements of“Product”,“People”and“Place”.the element“Product”is considered as the core in marketing while appreciation resources in the corpus mainly evaluate education quality（which is product）.This explains why the appreciation resources account for the largest proportion.The marketing element“People”indicates the unique and urgent need of positive evaluation for teaching staff in education industry,explaining why there are a relatively large number of judgement resources.Theoretically,this thesis has made some contribution to the research on both interpersonal meaning and education advertising.Practically,this research can provide education companies at home and abroad with enlightenment and guidance on effective publicity through advertising language.