i VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES BÙI THỊ KIM NGÂN A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF ADVERTISING LANGUAGE USED IN ENGLISH SLOGANS FOR FOOD AND DRINK PRODUCTS (PHÂN TÍCH MIÊU TẢ ĐẶC ĐIỂM NGÔN NGỮ KHẨU HIỆU QUẢNG CÁO MỘT SỐ SẢN PHẨM THỨC ĂN VÀ ĐỒ UỐNG) M. COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 HANOI - 2012 z ii VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES BÙI THỊ KIM NGÂN A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF ADVERTISING LANGUAGE USED IN ENGLISH SLOGANS FOR FOOD AND DRINK PRODUCTS (PHÂN TÍCH MIÊU TẢ ĐẶC ĐIỂM NGÔN NGỮ KHẨU HIỆU QUẢNG CÁO MỘT SỐ SẢN PHẨM THỨC ĂN VÀ ĐỒ UỐNG) M. COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 Supervisor: Kiều Thị Thu Hương, PhD. HANOI- 2012 z vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION .V TABLE OF CONTENTS.
VI LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .X LIST OF FIGURES. XI LIST OF TABLES. Statement of the problem and rationale for the study. Aims of the study.
Scope of the study. Organization of the study. 4 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW .1 ADVERTISING AS A DISCOURSE .1 Discourse and discourse analysis .1 Definition of discourse and discourse analysis .2 Context and its role in discourse analysis .2 Advertising as a discourse: Advertisements as Texts .2 CONCEPT OF ADVERTISING AND ADVERTISING SLOGANS .1 Definitions of advertising .2 Types of advertising.3 Advertising as kind of communication .4 Advertising slogan as an essential part of advertisement .1 Definitions of slogans and adverting slogans .2 Purposes of advertising slogans .3 FEATURES OF ADVERTISING LANGUAGE .1 Syntactic Features of Advertising Language .2 Verbless and non-finite clauses .2 Lexical Features of Advertising Language .4 Personal Pronouns and Possessive Determiners .5 New words and phrases .3 Semantic Features of Advertising Language .4 Phonological Features of Advertising Language .4 REVIEW OF RELATED STUDIES ON ADVERTISING LANGUAGE AND ADVERTISING SLOGANS. 29 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .2 Description of research samples .3 DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURES .4 DATA ANALYSIS PROCEDURES.
34 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .1 SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF FOOD AND DRINK SLOGANS .1 Complexity of sentence structure.2 Types of sentence .2 LEXICAL FEATURES OF FOOD AND DRINK SLOGANS .1 Use of lexical verbs.2 Use of finite and non-finite verbs .3 Use of modal verbs .4 Use of tense .5 Use of negation .6 Use of voice .4 Personal pronouns and possessive determiners .5 New words and phrases .3 SEMANTIC FEATURES OF FOOD AND DRINK SLOGANS .1 Use of metaphor .2 Use of metonymy.3 Use of personification .4 Use of hyperbole .4 PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES OF FOOD AND DRINK SLOGANS .1 Use of rhyme .2 Use of assonance.3 Use of alliteration .4 Use of onomatopoeia. SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS .1 Implications for creating effective slogans .2 Implications for teaching Business English and linguistics. LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES.
63 APPENDIX – LIST OF ENGLISH FOOD AND DRINK SLOGANS. I z x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS SFL Systemic Functional Linguistics TEFL Teaching English as a foreign language TESL Teaching English as a second language z xi LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Distribution of four sub-categories of sentence structure 36 Figure 2: Distribution of four sentence types 39 Figure 3: Distribution of finite and non-finite verbs 41 Figure 4: Popularity of four figures of speech in the corpus 49 Figure 5: Occurrence of four figures of speech in the corpus 50 Figure 6: Popularity of four sound devices in the corpus 55 Figure 7: Occurrence of four sound devices in the corpus 56 z xii LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1: Twenty most popular verbs in Leech‟s (1966) sample 17 Table 2: Twenty most popular adjectives in Leech‟s (1966) sample 18 Table 3: Information on advertising slogans used for research analysis 33 Table 4: Four aspects of advertising language examined 34 Table 5: Most frequently used verbs in the corpus 40 Table 6: Most frequently used adjectives in the corpus 45 Table 7: Occurrence of pronouns and possessive determiners in the corpus 47 z 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Statement of the problem and rationale for the study Nowadays, in a developed world, thousands of new products and services are introduced each day, which makes advertising become a real art - the art of informing, persuading customers and deeply embedding into their minds. According to Bovée et al.
(1995:16-20), advertising has never been as ubiquitous as it is nowadays. Language in advertising is typified by a slogan which is present in every advertisement. Slogans can be considered the heart of advertisements wherever they appear. Angela Goddard in her book “The language of advertising” titles these slogans the hooks which she calls “the initial piece of attention-seeking verbal language used to draw the reader in” (Goddard, 1998:106).
Slogans are the most important and condensed messages advertisers would like to send to their customers. Sharp and intelligent slogans can help advertisers leave unforgettable impressions on their potential customers‟ minds. They provide continuity for a campaign and reduce a key theme or idea the company wants to be associated with its product or itself to a brief statement (Bovée and Arens, 1992:274). However, creating a successful slogan is never an easy task.
The use of just a few words in a slogan proves to be harder than it is supposed to be. It requires a sophisticated linguistic insight into phonology, lexicology, syntax as well as semantics and pragmatics. Hence, the study on some successful slogans promises to bring about a lot of interesting facts in the art of using language especially among not only marketers but also sociologists, psychologists and especially linguists. Moreover, what can be called a successful slogan is still a question.
The answer depends on the area of products and services the slogan is used, the country or geographical regions it is used in and maybe the population of its target customers. A slogan plays an important role to attract consumers because it sums up the specialty, the benefit, and the marketing position as well as the commitment of a product or service advertised. Moreover, a slogan should reflect the mood and the message conveyed by the advertisement. z 2 In this study, the researcher chooses to analyze the advertising slogans of some world-famous food and drink products in English for some main reasons.
First of all, when those products can be called famous, they must be successful in many aspects. They may have a special secret of creating a great or even unique taste or they may have a long history of building their own prestige and class. But one thing that can be ensured is their successful advertising campaigns in which slogans play a vital part. The investigation into those slogans will hopefully reveal interesting features in language used in slogans in general and food and drink slogans in particular.
Second, food and drink products play a very important part in our daily life as an indispensible demand, so they have a wide scope of activities with customers of different ages, backgrounds, religions, beliefs and values. In this way, the slogans of those products, in a current competitive market today, need to be created with a very careful choice of language to persuade their wide variety of demanding customers. Hence, an investigation into linguistic features of advertising slogans can be of great value to producers if they want to create a persuasive and effective slogan to advertise their products. Last but not least, investigations into slogans in general and into linguistic features of slogans in particular are limited and outnumbered by investigations into other fields of advertising.
In fact, while there exist quite a lot of papers on advertising language, there are only a few studies on linguistic features of slogans such as “An investigation into the style of the English language used in advertising slogans issued by some world-famous airlines” (Bui, 2008) or “Presupposition and implicature in English and Vietnamese advertising slogans” (Tran, 2007). However, these studies only yield insight into some surface linguistic features of slogans or they only analyze slogans in light of some sub-branches of pragmatics. Moreover, this is the first time slogans for food and drink products have been discussed among MA theses in ULIS and becomes one of the few papers on food and drink slogans in the world. For all the reasons mentioned above and be motivated by previous studies, a study entitled: “A descriptive analysis of linguistic features of advertising language used in English slogans for food and drink products” is carried out.
By conducting this study, the researcher hopes to gain better insight into the most significant linguistic features of the advertising language used in English slogans for food and drink products. This study with its results is hoped to be served as an invaluable source of reference for teachers and z 3 learners of English as a foreign language, translators, advertisers and those who concern themselves about this subject matter. Aims of the study The objective of this study is to investigate the advertising slogans for food and drink products in the phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic aspects to draw out the most significant linguistic features of advertising language used in these English slogans. Moreover, the study also grasps some implications especially in ways of creating an effective slogan for food and drink products in the Vietnamese context to achieve success for the brands.
Research question In brief, the study seeks the answers to this research question: What are the most significant linguistic features of food and drink slogans in English? Specifically, the linguistic features of slogans are analyzed based on these four different levels: phonological level lexical level syntactic level semantic level 4. Scope of the study Within a shortage of time and the limited scale of a M.A thesis, the researcher only investigates into 112 food and drink English slogans in print advertisements which are listed in one of the most famous website with a large database of English advertising slogans – adslogans.uk instead of analyzing advertising slogans of all fields and from all sources. Moreover, the study deals with English slogans for food and drink products in four linguistic aspects, namely syntactic features from the aspect of sentence complexity, semantic features including some figures of speech, phonological features including some z 4 rhetorical sound devices , and lexical ones which refer to some most frequently – used words in advertising language. Stylistic features or some other extra-linguistic factors such as typography and layout are excluded.
This choice of areas to be discussed, therefore, helps the researcher obtain insight into the subject matter in a careful and thorough way in order to provide the most valuable results. Methodology This study has used descriptive and analytic methods as it “involves a collection of techniques used to specify, delineate, or describe naturally occurring phenomena without experimental manipulation” (Seliger & Shohamy, 1989:124). These methods have been utilized to analyze and describe the frequency of the occurrence of some linguistic phenomena in food and drink slogans. The descriptive method helps provide in-depth descriptions of food and drink slogans and the analytic method helps identify and isolate certain aspects to focus on.
The study has also used a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative method has been deployed in collecting and processing the data and the qualitative method is necessary to establish the theoretical framework, examine the data and draw conclusions. Organization of the study The study consists of an introduction and four chapters. The section entitled “INTRODUCTION” outlines the background of the study.
In this part, a brief account of relevant information including the rationale, aims, research question, scopes, methodology, and organization of the study is provided. Chapter 1, with the title “LITERATURE REVIEW”, can be considered a brief overview of some previous papers on the same subject in English.