A Discourse Analysis of Destination Slogans in English and Vietnamese

Abstract

Advertising slogans can hold the key to the success of tourism destinations. In highly competitive times, nearly all the tourism destinations want to attract potential tourists and expand their market share by using a special brand slogan. All official destination slogans are produced carefully by professional slogan creators, it is interesting to identify and describe the discourse features of destination slogans in English and Vietnamese. For this purpose, a data source of 200 destination slogans (120 in English and 80 in Vietnamese) was analyzed with the focus on lexical choices, syntactic structure and stylistic devices used. In term of lexical features, we have mentioned to four outstanding points: trigger verbs, adjectives, pronouns and numerals. Lexical use with appropriate words coins an appealing and memorable destination slogan.