A Study on the Moods of Advertising English
广告英语中的语气研究
A Study on the Moods of Advertising English
广告英语中的语气研究
Abstract: According to the theories of Hallidays’ systematic functional grammar, this paper analyzes three main moods of the English advertising. They are indicative mood, imperative mood, and interrogative mood. These three moods play important roles in attracting customers, serving information, reducing the distance between businessmen and customers, and spurring customers to consume.
Key words: moods, advertising English, indicative mood, imperative mood, interrogative mood.
1.0 Introduction
Advertising plays an important role in the modern society, and in certain degree, advertising figures our social life. As an important mean promoting commodity, we can see the advertisements everywhere in our life. Because of advertisement design aiming at promoting commodity or service, advertisers should use all means in advertising words design to build a good relationship with customers. This paper focuses on the moods analysis of the advertising English from the viewpoint of Hallidays’ systematic functional grammar, to find out how the advertisers use the moods building a good relationship with customers to realize their commercial purposes.
2.0 Moods
Advertisement can be classified into two classes: interactive and non-interactive. Interactive advertisement is dialogical, and non-interactive advertisement is soliloquizing. All advertisements are dialogical in a sense, but their degrees are different from each other. So advertising English is a kind of imitational dialogue, and in this paper, advertisements are analyzed as dialogues. According to the systematic functional grammar, analyzing moods can reveal better the interpersonal relationship between the participants of the dialogue. People play many different roles in society, and they change different roles to communicate with different people. But whatever role they change, the purpose is building a certain relationship, communicating information, or enquiring (胡冰霞, 2007).
A good English advertisement not only offers enough information to consumers, but can arouse echo in consumers’ hearts, and spur them to buy the commodity. So, we can find that there are two basic language effects in the advertisement: offering and demanding(Holliday, 1994: 68). According to the analysis, Moods system closely relate with these two effects. Moods system includes indicative mood and imperative mood. And the indicative mood is divided into indicative mood and interrogative mood. Traditionally, indicative mood plays a role which offers information, and interrogative mood is the effect of getting information, and imperative mood is service demanding which is called by Halliday. But in the advertisements, one language effect will function with more than one mood, even function with three moods at the same time.
2.1 Indicative mood
In the advertising English, advertisers often write advertisements as precisely and tersely as possible. And short and sweet (池璇,2009) declarative sentence is often used to introduce product and service’s characters, functions, and effects in advertisements. Terseness and preciseness are the indicative mood’s main characters. And offering information is its main effect.
Eg (1): It floats and it’s 99.44% pure (胡冰霞, 2007). This is a soap advertisement, and it shows the soap’s characters and quality with a terse declarative sentence. This advertisement’s words are simple, but it makes the product’s advantages and characters outstanding, and the consumers accept it easily.
2.2 Imperative mood
We often think that imperative mood is the mood of command, request, order and call. So different students have different views on imperative mood can be used or not in the advertising discourse and the advertisers have right or not to “order” consumers. But in advertisements, though advertisers haven’t any right to order people to buy their produces or services, the indirect order or advice often is put forward. Because of the “order” effect of imperative mood, advertisers usually use this mood in advertising discourse to convince and lead people’s behavior.
Eg (2): Come To Life In Hawaii. This is a travel advertisement. It’s written with imperative mood, and it spurs consumers to buy the service with suggested, encouraged, promoted tone.
Besides, imperative mood also can offer produce and service’s information which include the names of produces or advertisers’, address, contact phone numbers and so on.
Eg (3): Widen your world with Carnival. Make smart choice for your exciting life(朱洪涛, 2003). This is a car advertisement. It not only encourages customs to buy the car, but also offers the car’s name, and lead people think that if own Carnival car, they will own the whole world.
Eg (4): Just do it. It is Nike’s gym shoes advertisement. This advertisement and Nike’s produces are popular all over the world. It uses imperative mood which is terse and decisive and make you decide to buy the produce firmly and rapidly.
2.3 Interrogative mood
Interrogative mood is very general in advertisement, because interrogative mood can arouse the consumers’ interest or curiosity easily. From the viewpoint of the psychology, interrogative mood divide the process that the advertisement transfer the information into asking and answering. That can make consumers’ getting information mode from passive accepting transfers to initiative comprehension. From the viewpoint of the linguistics, using interrogative mood can reduce the degree of difficulty in grammar (何素芳, 2009) and make people understand it more easily.
Eg (5): Arthritis pains? All you need is Bayer Aspirin(何素芳, 2009)! This is a medicine advertisement. At the beginning of the advertisement, there is a question putting to the consumers, but that isn’t a face to face communicating. The question just aim at leading people’s attention to the latter part of the advertisement. So interrogative mood’s main effect is attract people’s attentions, and arouse their interests in the information which is the advertisement wants to show. Through the question, there is a dialogical relationship having built between advertisements and consumers.
3.0 Conclusion
According to the analysis of above advertising English examples and the moods analysis, indicative mood, imperative mood and interrogative mood play very important roles in advertising. Using moods neatly in the advertisement not only offers information and attracts consumers’ attentions, but builds a good relationship and close the distance with consumers. Different moods have different characters and effects, and only understanding these characters and effects, will the moods use more skillfully in advertisements and advertisers’ purposes realize more easily
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