Abstract

Objectives The purpose of this paper is to compare the transitivity of business advertising language and public service advertising language in China from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Business advertising is a genre that aims to persuade consumers and is highly embedded with consumer sensibilities, while public service advertising is a genre that best reflects the social concerns and changes of an era or country.
 Methods According to SFL, there are six types of Process Types in the transitivity: material process, mental process, relational process, existential process, behavioral process, and verbal process. By analyzing Chinese advertising language according to the differences in process types, we can identify the characteristics of business advertising, the characteristics of public service advertising, the differences between business advertising and public service advertising, and the changes in the transitivity at the level of Chinese-Korean translation. Our findings on these issues are as follows.
 Results First, business advertising is characterized by a large number of material and mental processes. In particular, mental processes are more prevalent in advertising for alcohol, beverages, and food products. Due to the nature of the industry, advertising for alcohol, beverages, and food products mainly use the senses of sight and taste to recommend products to the audience. This is likely due to the fact that business advertisements use concise language to arouse consumers' desire to buy and generate profits for companies. Second, unlike the high use of mental processes in business advertising, they are very low in public service advertising, and material processes are most prevalent in public service advertising. The prevalence of material processes in public service advertising is likely due to the fact that they are related to the interests of the people as a whole and emphasize the communication purpose of persuasion and appeal to gain the cooperation of the general public. Third, we also examined the changes in the transitivity during the translation process from Chinese to Korean. By comparing the transitivity of the original and translated advertising, we found three types of changes: addition, reduction, and conversion. Through the presentation of major cases of translation variation, we examined the characteristics of each variation and the reasons for its occurrence.
 Conclusions The systematic functional linguistic characteristics of Chinese advertising derived from the above analyses would help readers to understand the characteristics of Chinese advertising language, and may also be helpful for those who study Chinese advertising language, develop Chinese slogans, or teach Chinese slogans.

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