A discourse analysis of film reviews In english and vietnamese

Abstract

The study is an attempt to find out the discourse features of film reviews in English and Vietnamese. In this thesis, I use a combination of some methods such as descriptive, comparative, contrastive, analytic, inductive, and reductive method. The data for analysis in this thesis are 100 English film reviews and 100 Vietnamese ones from a number websites with the average length from over 300 to 800 words. The study focuses on finding out the similarities and differences between English film reviews and Vietnamese film reviews in terms of their layout, syntactic features, lexical choices and cohesive devices. In terms of the layout, both languages consist of four parts in a film review, namely, Introduction, Plot Summary, Remarks about Film and Overall Verdict. In the lexical choices, emotive adjectives and intensifiers are important words to attract readers and emphasize the quality of a film. In the syntactic features, cleft sentences and passive forms are used as dominant tools. Besides, to create a smooth and cohesive discourse, grammatical and lexical cohesion are indispensable. I hope that the thesis will be a useful result for teaching and learning English. This study may also be helpful for writers of film reviews.