Abstract

    This thesis will take Zhang Delu’s appliable social semiotics as a theoretical basis with six features to study the advertising discourse. Moreover, this thesis will make some concrete studies on KFC advertisements with the purpose to further prove that appliable social semiotics theory is a good method to make the advertising discourse analysis.
    This thesis can be divided into four parts. Chapter one is an introduction, which mainly introduces the background, the purpose and significance of this study as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review, which covers some basic concepts and the overview of the previous studies. Chapter three is the main body of this thesis, which will use KFC advertisements to support the study. The last chapter is a conclusion, including the major findings, limitations of the research and the suggestions for the further study.

Key words:  advertising discourse analysis  appliable social semiotics  KFC advertisements

摘要

本文将以张德禄的适用性社会符号学作为理论依据，从该理论的六大特点来分析广告话语，并通过对于肯德基广告的分析，来进一步论证社会符号学在广告话语分析中的适用性。
本文将分为四个部分来进行论述。第一章是简介，主要介绍本文的研究背景,研究的目的与重要性以及本文的框架。第二章是文献综述，主要陈述一些基本的概念以及前人的研究。第三章是文章的主体部分，将结合肯德基广告对于研究做出进一步的论述。最后一章是结论，包含对于本研究的主要发现，不足之处和对今后研究的建议。

关键词: 广告话语分析；适用社会符号学；肯德基广告

1.1 Background
With the fast development of the society, advertising has become one part of people’s life and even has influenced their life. Advertising is issued by the advertisers with some persuasive ways to convey the information of the products, service and beliefs. As an ideal media to promote the products, advertising has effects on people’s life in different forms. In addition, advertising discourse is a special language which has drawn lots of experts’ attention.
Halliday developed Saussure’s semiotics theory and put forward the theory of social semiotics. Moreover, a Chinese scholar, Zhang Delu, did a in-depth research on Halliday’s social semiotics and considered it as an applicable theory. However, few studies focus on the perspective of social semiotics to analyze the advertising discourse. Therefore, it is very meaningful to take social semiotics, especially appliable social semiotics, to make an analysis of the advertising discourse.