In the modern era, with the rapid development of commodity economy and information industry, advertising has become the most popular way people promote goods. It has unknowingly deeply affected people's daily lives and their perception of commodities. Commercial advertising is a kind of publicity event in which the information of a product is conveyed to a certain target market through the media for the purpose of prompting sales^[1]. As for any successful advertisement, its language should not only be able to provide information for potential consumers, but also can affect them and ultimately convince them to take purchasing actions. In other words, commercial advertising aims to establish a true relationship of marketing and consumption between sellers and consumers. For this reason, interpersonal function of language is extremely highlighted in commercial advertising.

    As a special literary style, advertising’s uniqueness has been attracting enthusiasts and scholars to explore. This thesis, based on the theory of interpersonal function in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, will conduct a relatively brief study on such three aspects as mood system, modality system and person system in several advertising discourses, in order to find out how advertisers effectively employ the three systems to achieve their purposes of persuasion.

    Through the analysis of functional grammar in commercial advertising discourse, we can further know the inner meaning of advertising language, thus deepening our understanding of many advertisements. In addition, advertisers are able to make advertisements with the best advertising effect according to the commonness and individuality of different types of advertisements, effectively promoting their goods and services. This is of great benefit in today’s increasingly competitive international economy and business. On the other hand, consumers will have a better knowledge of advertisements, and then make more rational judgments about goods and services advertised.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1 Systemic Functional Grammar  

    Systemic Functional Grammar is a set of grammatical theory first built by a British linguist, M. A. K. Halliday. Different from traditional grammar and transformational-generative grammar, it focuses on what meanings the speaker needs to express, rather than what the speaker can say. It is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social context. Therefore, language is regarded as a product of social activities.