The Discursive Strategies Of Legal Public Service Advertisements From The Value Negotiation Perspective

The Chinese legal public service advertisement(hereafter referred to as PSA)is a newly born legal genre,which has been one kind of essential media utilized to promote legal education.Thus,it makes great practical and theoretical significance to study the discourse of legal PSA,especially on how values are negotiated.Despite that,it seems difficult to find research results concerning the generic study of the Chinese legal PSA from the linguistic perspective.Moreover,few researchers tend to focus on legal ads from a value negotiation perspective.It still has a lot of potentials for scholars to conduct a study on legal discourse.This thesis intends to fill this gap and mainly adopts genre theory and appraisal theory from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics.For quantitative analysis,this study conducts a corpus-based analysis with the UAM Corpus Tool.The data,consisting of 60 pieces of dynamic legal PSA,is drawn from CCTV and other official advertising media,and the total length counts to 10536 words.For qualitative analysis,the study explores the genre type and prosodic pattern of legal PSA.It further elaborates explicit and implicit linguistic patterns based on the appraisal system.This thesis aims at revealing language strategies in legal PSA from the perspective of value negotiation,which may shed light on the research of legal discourse analysis and offer practical implications for domestic legal education while applying PSA.This thesis mainly answers the following three questions: What is the genre type of legal PSA? What explicit resources are employed to reach emotional,ethical,and rational persuasion in legal PSA? What implicit resources are employed in legal PSA to engage viewers?This paper reveals the following findings based on genre and appraisal analysis:(1)Legal PSA is shown as a genre complex,including instructive discourse,expository discourse,interrogative discourse,adjudicative discourse,evaluation discourse,and story-telling discourse.Speakers tend to employ several types of the above discourses in legal PSA to achieve the strategy of value negotiation.In addition,positive attitude couplings can play the role of goal fulfillment,while negative ones can play the role of goal disruption.They both can be embedded in the genre subtypes at the same time to achieve the generic purpose of legal PSA.(2)The discourse of legal PSA,as one kind of non-commercial ads,enacts the value negotiation strategies of Emotional Persuasion,Ethical Persuasion,and Rational Persuasion.First,Emotional Persuasion is achieved through negative affect towards problematic events and positive emotions towards role models.Second,Ethical Persuasion is built through appraisal resources of judgment.In terms of prosody,inscribed positive judgments,especially the tenacity and veracity types,are normally employed to praise honest officials and influential figures.Compared with positive judgments,negative ones towards illegal or immoral behaviors occur more,which normally concern the propriety of ordinary people.Lastly,the strategy of Rational Persuasion is achieved through appreciation resources.In the discourse of legal PSA,positive appreciations are overwhelmingly used to evaluate the valuation of abstract entities such as financial order,community future,economic activities,etc.(3)Legal PSA builds implicit value negotiation strategies in two ways: establishing in-group intimacy to engage audiences or indicating out-group hostility to make implicit commands.And it is noted that the use of metaphors can serve these two purposes well.Moreover,the distributions of downscale graduation resources in legal PSA are outnumbered by upscale graduations.It suggests that to achieve better persuasive effects,the use of upscale graduations plays a dominant role since it serves to attract viewers’ attention to where the speaker expects.Lastly,another value negotiation strategy lies in the usage of transitivity processes.Rather than explicitly expressing their feelings,speakers show strong objectivity to naturally arouse audiences’ attitudes.In all,the use of metaphor,graduation resources,or transitivity processes shows the attempt of speakers to build status equality with viewers to obtain better persuasive effects.By studying Attitude-Ideation couplings in legal PSA from different prosodies explicitly and implicitly,this paper discusses the way to negotiate values in the legal PSA discourse.This research on the one hand provides implications in polishing legal PSA and on the other hand,extends the previous linguistic theory of discourse analysis to shed light on the study of legal discourse.