Abstract

With the rapid development of commercialization and informatization of the whole world, advertising as a kind of mass media has already penetrated into every corner of the society, and become a very important part of people’s daily life. In modern times, many scholars are undertaking researches on English advertisements from different aspects. As one of the most important theories of linguistics, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is also used to analyze English advertisements, but studies on this topic are not specific enough and still need to explore further. So in this paper, the author tries to make a functional analysis of advertising English based on the Systemic Functional Grammar theory and previous works of other scholars, hoping that this study could not only expand the application fields of Systemic Functional Grammar and enrich the theoretical study of advertising English, but also give some practical and useful suggestions to advertisers when they create advertisements of products or service. Since English advertisements have too many forms, the author cannot cover all of them, in this thesis, only scenario commercial English advertisements will be deeply analyzed.This paper is divided into four chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces the background of this thesis and reviews the previous works by other scholars on advertising English.Chapter Two introduces the theoretical basis of this article, including the definition of scenario English advertisements and the main points of Systemic Functional Grammar. Chapter Three applies the three metafunctions of SFG to analyze the features of scenario English advertisements.Chapter Four summarizes the main results of this research, discusses the deficiency of this research and gives some suggestions to improve.

Key words: scenario English advertisements; the Systemic Functional Grammar; the ideational metafunction; the interpersonal metafunction; the textual metafunction

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-1

1.1. Research Background-1

1.2. The Previous Works-1

1.2.1. The Classification of English Advertisements-1

1.2.2. Researches from Perspectives of Stylistics, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics and Semiotics-2

1.2.3. Researches from Systemic Functional Grammar-2

1.3. The Methodology and the Structure of this Research-3

2. Theoretical Framework-5

2.1. The Definition of Scenario English Advertisements-5

2.2. Three Metafunctions of Language-5

2.2.1. The Ideational Metafunction-6

2.2.2. The Interpersonal Metafunction-7

2.2.3. The Textual Function-9

3. Analysis of the Scenario English Advertisements with the Systemic Functional Grammar-11

3.1. Analysis of Ideational Metafunction-12

3.1.1. Analysis of Transitivity-12

3.1.2. Analysis of voice-15

3.2. Analysis of interpersonal Metafunction-16

3.2.1. Analysis of Mood-16

3.2.2. Case analysis of modality-18

3.3. Analysis of Textual Metafunction-20

3.3.1. Analysis of Thematic Structure-20

3.3.2. Analysis of Cohesion-21

4. Conclusion-22

4.1. Research Summary-22

4.2. Limitations of the Research-23

4.3. Suggestions for the Research-24

References-25