A discourse analysis of the linguistic features of the advertisements of food and drink In english versus vietnamese

Abstract

This paper examined the speech acts and the stylistic devices used in ads of food and drink in English and Vietnamese, and identified the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese in advertisements of foods and drinks. This descriptive study was conducted with a contrastive analysis and employed the data from internet, newspapers, magazines and print materials such as labels of food packages. 200 samples in English and 200 samples in Vietnamese were collected at random and then stratified according to kinds of food and drink. The examination of speech acts used in ads of foods and drinks in English and Vietnamese such as representatives, directives, commissives and questions used in the ads of foods and drinks in English and Vietnamese provided qualitative information about their syntactic realizations as well as distinctive functions in the advertisement discourse. The result of the data analysis also showed the stylistic effect of the stylistic devices typically used in the advertisements of food and drink such as rhyme, parallelism and repetition in English and Vietnamese. The contrastive analysis of advertisements in food and drink yielded the contrastive information about the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese in advertisements of foods and drinks in terms of the utilization of speech acts and the stylistic devices.