A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE HOTEL ADVERTISEMENTS

Abstract

The language of advertising is a very special communicative form in society with customers through given products and services in which language has its own characteristics that makes it different from the other languages. This is a discourse analysis of hotel advertisements in English and Vietnamese. The data for analysis in this thesis are 200 samples of advertisements (100 in English and 100 in Vietnamese) are posted official websites of travel agencies. The study is carried out based on the theories of discourse analysis and a combination of a variety of methods, namely descriptive, contrastive, analytic and inductive methods. The study focuses on analyzing some discourse features of English hotel advertisements and Vietnamese ones in order to point out the similarities and differences between them in terms of their layout, lexical features, stylistic and cohesive devices. The findings show that both English hotel advertisements and Vietnamese ones mostly share a three-part structure, including: the Body Copy, Illustration and Standing Details; however, the different point is that in most hotel advertisements in English (EHAds) there exists a “Key Sentence” which aims to draw readers’ attention. Besides, lexical choice is used to describe benefits, location as well as conveniences of hotels. In addition, reference, conjunction and repetition in both English and Vietnamese hotel advertisements are also exploited in cohesive devices. Finally, rhetorical devices reveal that simile, metaphor and hyperbole are the most prominent stylistic devices used in hotel advertisements in both English and Vietnamese. Based on the findings, the thesis is hoped to provide some implications and suggestions for teaching and learning in both languages. This study is also significant in providing some contributions both theoretically and practically, especially for those who are interested in hotel business and those who work for travel agencies.