A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF MOBILE PHONE ADVERTISEMENTS 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 discourse analysis of mobile phone advertisements in English and Vietnamese. The descriptive and contrastive methods are employed to give a detailed description of the typical discourse features and to point out the similarities and differences between English mobile phone advertisements and Vietnamese mobile phone advertisements in terms of their layout, lexical features, stylistic and cohesive devices. In addition, the findings of this study are clearly presented based on a survey of 140 samples of mobile phone advertisements (70 in English and 70 in Vietnamese). It is hoped that the result of this study will provide certain linguistically useful practical knowledge for teachers and learners of English as well as those who are interested in the advertising field.