A Contrastive Analysis of Hotel Service Reviews In English and in Vietnamese

Abstract

The study attempts to conduct a contrastive analysis of hotel service reviews in English and in Vietnamese. Both similarities and differences in English and Vietnamese linguistic features in hotel service reviews are explored in this research. The data of the study consisting of 650 samples in English and 650 samples in Vietnamese are collected from one of the most famous review websites, Tripadvisor. In order to achieve the aims, the researcher carries out descriptive, contrastive, quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings of the study are compared to show the similarities and differences in terms of lexical choices, syntactic features and pragmatic features of hotel service reviews in both languages. In term of lexical choices, parts of speech including nouns, verbs and adjectives are focused mainly. Besides, some other lexical choices are presented, such as: abbreviations, borrowed words and slangs. In syntactic features, structure of a review is shown in both languages. This is also one of the most typical similarities of hotel service reviews in English and in Vietnamese. In this part, some sentence structures that have their high frequency in both English and Vietnamese hotel service reviews are pointed out. They are conditional sentences, wishing sentences, exclamatory sentences and comparative sentences. In the study, the readers would define the differences in syntactic features of hotel service reviews in English and in Vietnamese through their percentages in each collection. With the reference to pragmatic features, three speech acts of compliment, complaint and suggestion are employed with both direct and indirect manners in both English and Vietnamese hotel service reviews. Some tables are added in the research to show the differences in linguistic features of hotel service reviews in two languages belonging to two cultures. In addition, implications of the thesis could be a minor contribution to the other linguistic researches such as on impacts of English. on Vietnamese or studies relating to politeness linguistic strategies that should be applied in reviews in general and in hotel service reviews in particular.