Personal Pronouns as Means of Relation-Building in Advertising Discourse: An English-Chinese Contrastive Analysis

Personal pronouns, as a linguistic category, have been studied in various fields, such as grammatics, pragmatics and systemic-functional linguistics.From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, personal pronouns embody interpersonal and attitudinal meanings.Their use in advertising discourse serves to build certain relationships.Through the examination of two sample ads (one English and the other Chinese), this paper finds that in both English and Chinese advertising the first and second personal pronouns are mostly used and that they help build the close relationships between the advertiser and the readers by means of synthetic personalization.In the selection of personal pronouns, there exists some difference between English and Chinese advertising.