A STUDY OF LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF ADVERTISEMENTS FOR VEHICLES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

Abstract

The language of advertising is a very special one, which has its own characteristics that make it different from other languages. This study aims at conducting a linguistic analysis of vehicle advertisements in English and Vietnamese. The descriptive and contrastive methods were employed to give a detailed description of some typical linguistic features and to point out the similarities and differences between English vehicle advertisements (EVAs) and Vietnamese vehicle advertisements (VVAs) in terms of their layout, syntactic, semantic and lexical features. The findings of this study are clearly presented based on a survey of 110 vehicles advertisements in English and Vietnamese, which are taken from well-known and popular newspapers, magazines and websites in English and Vietnam. The findings show that both EVAs and VVAs share a similar structure. Most EVAs are formed by verb phrases and have conceptual meanings whereas most EVAs by adjective phrases with cononative meanings. For syntactic features, the advertisements of vehicles in both languages differ in sentence types and voice. For lexical features, the use of specialized technical terms in EVAs is higher than in VVAs .It is hoped that the results of the thesis provide useful documentation to those who are interested in vehicle advertisements.