[Abstract] The advertisement is an indispensable part in the society. So the researches on the English advertisements are becoming more and more useful and important. At the beginning of the thesis, the author holds the definition, the effect and the component of the advertisement. And then the author states something about discourse analysis from its definition, components, and levels. Discourse analysis is the process of description, explanation, illustration, and evaluation. The understanding of the text is the low level, but the high one is evaluating the text. Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) is proved that it is more suitable for discourse analysis than any other theories. It consists of systemic grammar and functional grammar. Systemic Grammar claims that language is a system network of meaning potential or that it is a semiotic system. Functional Grammar is classified language function into three parts: ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction. Finally, the author puts these theories into the practice of analyzing the English advertisement. With the discussion and analysis, it is proved that SFG can develop the relationship between them further, and English advertisement can be understood clearly.
[Key Words] English advertisement; discourse analysis; systemic functional grammar; functional grammar
[摘要]广告现在已经成为社会生活不可缺少的一部分，对广告语篇分析有其存在的必然性。论文首先论述了广告的定义，影响以及其文案的组成部分。接下来论述了关于语篇分析，从语篇分析的概念，组成部分，以及两个层面。语篇分析是一个描写，解释，说明，评估的过程，对语篇理解了还要会做出评论。而系统功能语法被指出这个语法比其他语言学框架更适合用来分析语篇，所以论文接下来描述了系统功能语法的理论内容去支持语篇分析，系统功能语法包括系统语法和功能语法。系统语法核心思想是认为语言是有个意义潜势的系统网络。功能语法从语言的功能的角度总结出语言的三大元功能：概念功能，人际功能，语篇功能。最后作者用以上的相关理论对一个英语广告实例进行了具体分析。通过以上论述和分析，作者证明了系统功能语法指导语篇分析的可行性。作者也望两者能更加的完善，以至能更系统地分析理解广告语篇。
[关键词] 英语广告； 语篇分析； 系统功能语法； 功能语法
1. Introduction
Since the 1960s, Halliday, the Professor of linguistics, develops a systematic and comprehensive theory of language, called “Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG)”, and publishes his book “An Introduction to Functional Grammar” in 1985 and 1994. Many scholars also published a number of books and papers on systemic grammar. The research of Systemic Functional Grammar begins in 1970s and become popular in the late 1980s.
English advertising begins in the medieval times and the advertising-boom appears in the 1920s. Today advertising has become an indispensable tool for modern companies and institutions. So the discourse analysis of English advertising is very necessary. With the analysis, people can understand the advertisement completely and supply the further improvement with some evidence.
Now few people have tried to use the theories of the SFG to analyze English advertisements. But Professor Huangguowen makes a detailed study on the combination of the SFG and the analysis of English advertisement in his newly published book “Theory and Practice of Discourse Analysis---A Study in Advertising Discourse (2001)”.
The thesis will make a tentative endeavor to apply the theories of the SFG to the analysis of English advertisements, hoping to prove that the theories of SFG can be used to analyze English advertising and are actually effective.
2. Advertising
2.1 The definition of advertising
Most of the scholars hold that “Advertising” originates from the Latin word “Adventure” which means arousing people’s interest to take action. In 1300 to 1475, it was changed to the medieval English “Advertise”, which meant, “Someone pays attention to something”. The first newspaper advertisement is said to have appeared in 1704 in the Boston News Letter in America. During the 18th century advertising grew in popularity both in Britain and the American colonies.
Before 1890, in the western, the definition of advertising is generally called, as “Advertising is a piece of news about the product or the service.” In 1948, The Committee on Definitions of the American Marketing Association defines: “the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, service or idea by identified sponsors through the various media.” American Sponsors Association hold: Advertising is the paid communication for the masses, and its final purpose is to transmit messages, change the attitude, induce people to take action and benefit identified sponsors. The Encarta Encyclopedia defines “advertising” as “a form of commercial mass communication designed to promote the sale of a product or service, or a message on behalf of an institution, organization, or candidate for political office”.[1]
Now, draw the following conclusion: “Advertising is a paid, mass-mediated attempt to persuade”. [2] Firstly, identified sponsors need to pay for it. Secondly, it is delivered through a communication medium designed to reach more than one person. Thirdly, it is the public communication designed to change or reinforce the attitude and the action.
2.2 The effect of advertising
Advertising can make a contribution to sales---along with the right product, the right price, and the right distribution. It can not only create social wealth directly and provide lots of jobs, but also promote the development of other industries. And advertising is related to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in that it can contribute to levels of overall consumer demand when it plays a key role in introducing new products. Advertising can have a stabilizing effect on downturns in business activity.
Advertising is alleged to stimulate competition and therefore motivate firms to strive for better products, better production methods, and other competitive advantages that ultimately benefit the economy as a whole.Due to the economies of scale produced by advertising, consumers actually realize less—expensive products. As broad-based demand stimulation results in lower production and administrative costs per unit, low prices are passed on to consumers. The pressure of competition and the desire to have fresh, marketable products stimulate firms to produce improved products and do some innovations. All of these can contribute to the standard of living and quality of life in a society.
Advertising educates consumers, equipping them with the information they need to make informed purchase decisions. Consumers become more educated regarding the features, benefits, functions, and value products. Further, consumers can become more aware of their own tendencies toward being persuaded and relying on certain types of product information. According to the above, better-educated consumers enhance their lifestyles and economic power through astute marketplace decision-making.
In all, with the development of the technology and the diversity of the mass media, advertising has influenced people pervasively in the daily life. Advertising plays an important role in the society. Foreign countries (especially American) have developed the advertising for a long time, so Chinese need to use the experience of other countries for reference. That is the study of English advertising has its necessity. The study of analysis of English advertising is meaningful.
2.3The components of copywriting
“Copywriting is the process of expressing the value and benefits; a brand has to offer, via written or verbal descriptions.”[3] A complete piece of copywriting generally consists of headline (including sub-headline), body copy, slogan, and supplementary items.
The headline is the most important part, which is the leading sentence used at the top or bottom of the advertising. It should arouse interests and attract attentions. It can make people keep on reading and get to know more about the product being sold. It must be short, simple word about not more than 10 words, but it includes enough information, the name of brand and so on. Subhead is an additional headline usually appears above or below the headline. It includes important brand information not included in the headline. Like the headline it transmits key selling points or brand information quickly. It should reinforce the headline and serves as a transition to the body copy.
Body copy tells a more complete story about the product or service, only one out of 10 readers read the body copy, so it will arouse people’s interest and more information for people to know of. Generally it includes emotional copy and reason-why copy.
Slogan, its structure is similar to the headline. A slogan is a short phrase used to help establish an image, identity, or position for a brand or an organization. It can provides continuity across different media and between advertising campaigns. It expresses advertising message with brief, repeatable, and memorable statement. That is, it can make consumers take actions. Take some famous slogans for example: “Just do it! (Nike)”, “Fresh up with seven-up (Seven-up)”, “Things go better with Coca-cola (Coca-cola)”.
Supplementary items are the complete instructions of advertising content. It includes illustration, trademark, and name of commodity, logo type, address, telephone number, price, accounts number, box and panel, seal and so on. Illustration and trademark are very important in them. Most of people read ad following the order: illustration, headline, and body copy. So illustration is the most important part for a successful ad. Illustration arouses interest to read the headline, identify the subject of the ad, clarify claims made by the copy, and create a farmable impression of the information. Trademark includes brand name, corporate or store name and visual symbol. It maybe use in shortening. A well-known brand name is worthy and therefore is of great importance to a corporation. The features of the trademark are describable and remarkable,such as “Ford”, “Adidas”.
3. Discourse analysis
In 1952, Zellings.Harriss, the structuralists, reported the article “Discourse Analysis” in the magazine “Language”. In the last 50 years, a lot of scholars make some efforts to this subject and gain some achievements. From the document, discourse analysis involves linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, literature, information science and so on, and gradually forms the knowledge studying language-in-use in the communication.
“Discourse analysis is the study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such paragraphs, conversations, interview, etc. For example, discourse analysis deals with (a) how the choice of articles, pronouns, and tenses affects the structure of the discourse. (b) The relationship between utterances in a discourse. (c) The moves made by speakers to introduce a new topic, change the topic, or assert a higher role relationship to the other participants.”[4]
“Discourse analysis emphasizes that language is not merely a self-contained system of symbols but more importantly a mode of doing, being, and becoming. Discourse analysis seeks to describe and explain linguistic phenomena in terms of the affective, cognitive, situational, and cultural contexts of their use and to identify linguistic resources through which we (re) construct our life (our identity, belief, ideology, and so forth). Essentially, it asks why we use language the way we do and how we live lives linguistically. Discourse analysis insists on the use of naturally occurring language date (as opposed to invented data)”. [5]
Generally speaking, discourse analysis is a developing and non-qualitative subject, which has neither the guidance of a specific theory nor generally recognized analysis ways and steps. Schiffirn, American discourse analyst, introduces six methods using in the discourse analysis: speech act theory, international sociologist, and the ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. M.A.K.Halliday in his book “An introduction to Functional Grammar”holds that “The aim (of SFG) has been to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English.”[6]
3.1 Purpose of discourse analysis
SFG construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis, so most of scholars insist that it is more suitable for discourse analysis than any other theories. That is SFG is the approach proposed in the study of discourse analysis. The discourse analysis guiding by SFG is called as “Functional discourse analysis”.
Some analysts think discourse analysis is the interpretive activity, because its purpose is to help the readers understand the meaning of the text and the writer. But functional discourse analysis is the explanatory activity; its purpose is to explain why the text expresses the meaning. Halliday and Hasan hold that the purpose of the text analysis is explanation not interpretation. For a text, the purpose of “interpretation” is to understand what the meaning of the text is, but the purpose of “explanation” is to make clear that how the text expresses its meaning. According to the author’s understanding, the explanatory activity includes interpretive activity, because before explaining how a text expresses its meaning, people will know what the meaning of a text is.
The purpose of functional discourse analysis is to evaluate the text. Before evaluating a text, discourse analysis must study the text from “What is the meaning of the text?” “How does the text express the meaning?” “Why does the text express the meaning?”
In all, the purpose of discourse analysis is explanatory activity to evaluate the text.
3.2 Scopes of discourse analysis
Halliday holds that discourse analysis consists of context of culture, context of situation, language.
(I) Context of culture: language is the social phenomenon and the reflection of the social activity. Every text is produced and then affected in a particular context of culture. “Context of culture” refers to the text expressing all the meanings in the special society and culture (including purpose of communication, way of communication, form of communication, content of communication, etc). Context of culture is reflected by “genre”. Genre consists of schematic structure and realizational pattern.
(II) Context of situation: it is immediate environment of language activity, which is time, place, talking content, the relation among people related to transfer communicational meanings. Halliday and Hasan (1985) divide context of situation into three parts: field, tenor and mode.
(a) Field refers to what is being talk about, what is it that the participants are engaged in, in which the language figures as some essential components.
(b) Tenor refers to the people involved in the communication and the relationship between them. What kinds of role relationships obtain among the participants, including permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another, both the types of speech role that they are taking on in the dialogue and the whole cluster of socially significant relationships in which they refer to.
(c) Mode refers to how the language is functioning in the interaction, e.g. whether it is written or spoken.
(III) Language includes semantics, lexico-grammar, and phonology/graphology. According to the view of Halliday, language chiefly expresses three functions/meanings: Ideational function, Interpersonal function and Textual function. The three functions are related to context and lexico-grammar. Field determines the experiential meanings that expressed. Tenor determines the interpersonal meanings. Mode determines the textual meanings. And these three functions are embodied by lexico-grammar. “However, but, nevertheless” express textual meanings.
Schematic structure
Context of culture
Realizational structure
Field
Text Context of situation Tenor
Mode
Semantics
Language Lexico-grammar
Phonology/graphology
3.3Levels of discourse analysis
In “An Introduction to Functional Grammar”, Halliday holds “In any piece of discourse analysis, there are always two possible levels of achievement to aim at. One is a contribution to the understanding of the text: the linguistic analysis enables one to show how and why, the text means what it does. In the process, there are likely to be revealed multiple meanings, alternatives, ambiguities, metaphors and so on.”[7] That is, the low lever is the activity of describing and explaining the text. “It is one that should always be attainable provided features of the language---provided it is based on a grammar, in other words.” Another level is the evaluation of the text: “the linguistic analysis may enable one to say why the text is, or is not, an effective text for its own purposed---in what respects it succeeds and in what respects it fails, or is less successful.”[8] That is, the high level is the activity of interpreting and evaluating the text. In order to attain the goal, it requires analyzing the text, and analyzing the context (context of situation, context of culture) and the relationship between context and text. So the analysts need to decode the further meaning of the text and evaluate the use of words and grammars in context of situation and the context of culture.
According to huangguowen, SFG is more suitable for analyzing the text. It is because SFG is the text grammar. It is because grammar is to describe how the use of language, that is, the way to say and understand the meaning of the text clearly. It is because SFG describe the systemic network of the three metafunction clearly. It does because applying the framework of SFG to analyze the text can avoid evaluating at will.
The following is the description of SFG, and why it can guide discourse analysis.
4. Systemic functional grammar
In Halliday’s book “An Introduction to Functional Grammar”, he says” the theory on which this description is based, systemic theory follows in the European functional tradition. It is largely based on Firth’s system-structure theory, but derives more abstract principles from Hjelmslev and owes many ideas to Prague School. The organizing concept is that of the “system”, which is used essentially in Firth’s sense of a functional Paradigm but developed into the formal construct of a ‘system network’.”[9]
SFG has two components: systemic grammar and functional grammar. In Huzhuanglin’s book “Linguistics. A course Book”, he holds that “Systemic grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, or meaning potential. And this network consists of subsystem from which language users make choices. Functional grammar aims to reveal that language is a mean of social interaction, based on the position that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the uses or functions which they serve.”[10]
4.1 Systemic grammar
“Systemic grammar is an approach to grammatical analysis which is based on a series of systems. Each system is a set of options of which one must be chosen at each relevant point in the production of an utterance. For example, in English, the speaker or writer makes choices among the systems of number.”[11] The central component of a systemic grammar is a chart of the full set of choices available in constructing a sentence, with a specification of the relationships between choices. Halliday’s systemic grammar has the following aspects: First, it has “system” as its central category. Second, it lays stress on relating the sociology. Third, it attaches importance to describe the characteristics of particular languages and particular varieties of languages. Fourth, language is a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection. Fifth, it uses clines to explain some language problems.
According to Huzhuanglin’s instruction “ In systemic grammar, the notion of system is made of a central explanatory principle, the whole of language being conceived as a ‘system of systems’, systemic grammar is concerned with establishing a network of systems of relationships, which accounts for all the semantically relevant choices in the language as a whole.”[12]
A system is a list of choices; the choices in a system are mutually exclusive. Every system is finite. The meaning of every choice in a system depends on the meaning of other choice in the system.
In all, systemic grammar makes people know “system” and “structure”. It requires people to analyze the text logically and regard the text as a unit.
In the description of the system, if the feature of the system appears in other system, that can be simultaneity or echelon. If the two systems appear in order, the features of them are ordinal. The systemic grammar is selecting a general area of meaning, and gradually breaking it into smaller and smaller sub-areas. Choice is meaning. System gammar describes three Metafunctions. Each of the metafunctions is a complex system consisted of other systems, and choices are simultaneously done in the three metafunctions. This is the close relationship between systemic grammar and functional grammar.
4.2 Functional gammar
“In a functional grammar, on the other hand, the direction is reversed. A language is interpreted as a System of meanings can be realized.” [13] “Functional Grammar aims to reveal that language is a mean of social interaction, based on the position that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the uses or functions which they serve.”[14] The functions of language are the most important things in Functional Grammar.
As the tool of people’s communication, language undertakes all kind of functions. Halliday divides the function of language into three kinds: ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction.
4.2.1 Ideational Metafunction
“…A fundamental property of language is that it enables human beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what goes on around them and inside them.” [15] It is to convey new information, to communicate a content that is unknown to the listener.
The ideational metafunction is to organize the speaker or writer’s experience of the real or imaginary world and includes experiential function and logical function. What experiential function is that language expresses people’s experiences in external world (things, events qualities, etc) and internal world (thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc). What logical function refers to that language expresses the logical relationship between two or more than two meaning units.
(I). Experiential Function
Experiential function is chiefly embodied by transitivity and voice. “… Parallel with its evolution in the function of mood, expressing the active, interpersonal aspect of meaning, the clause evolved simultaneously in another grammatical function expressing the reflective, experiential aspect of meaning. This later is the system of transitivity. Transitivity specifies the different types of process that are recognized in the language, and the structures by which they are expressed.”[16] Transitivity is a semantic system. Its purpose is to divide something around people into several processes involving participant and circumstantial element. Halliday holds that transitivity includes six processes: (a) Material process. (b) Mental process. (c) Relational process. (d) Behavioral process. (e) Verbal process. (f) Existential process.
(a) Material Process: process of doing
Material process is a process of doing. The process usually consists of verb, actor (logical subject) and goal (noun or pronoun)
He killed all the people
Actor Process goal
(b) Mental Process: process of thinking
Mental process is a process of thinking involving perception (see, look), reaction (like,fear) and cognition (knowing, believing, and understanding) and so on. Metal process has two participants: sensor, and phenomenon. Sensor refers to the person who perceives and phenomenon is the something that is perceived by the sensor. Phenomenon includes concrete person or objects, abstract things, happened events and so on.
I Hear Him playing the piano next to the door.
Sensor Process Phenomenon
广告英语的模糊性探析
英文广告口号是英文广告的精髓