Nghiên cứu kiểu câu sử dụng trong quảng cáo du lịch trên trang web tiếng anh và tiếng việt)

INTRODUCTION

1. Rationale

Advertising is a device to arouse consumers' attention to a commodity and induce them to

use it. In the increasingly keen competition of the market economy, advertising is an

important means of scrambling for markets. According to the American Marketing

Association, Chicago, "Advertising is any paid form of non personal presentation of ideas,

goods and services by an identified sponsor."

Advertising is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Advertising has become the part and

parcel of present-day life. From everywhere around us, advertisements of diverse types

come naturally to our life. In spite of it, there is an attractive power, which is able to

manipulate the consumer; an invisible voice of advertisement advocates, encourages, asks,

announces and deeply embeds into peoples’ minds. Advertising unifies language, pictures,

music; it contains information, invokes emotions and imaginations, it can capture all five

human senses.

In order to enhance the appeal of an advertisement, advertising writers pay much attention

not only to such expressive devices as plates, color and the layout of a printed page, but

also to the choice of words or phrases or sentences, to make an advertisement beautiful and

attractive. In the practice of the advertising, people pay more and more attention to the use

of figures of speech with every effort to make the advertising succinct, accurate and vivid

and to provide rich imagination and plentiful associations for readers so as to stimulate

their desire.

In terms of advertising language, advertising texts are of great value for the analyses from

marketing experts, sociologist, etc. and last but not least linguists. Sociologists may be

interested in the fact, how advertising influences the values, attitudes and behavior of the

society. And marketing experts and advertising agencies are interested in the language of

advertising to find the tricks how to make advertising more effective. On the other hand,

linguists are interested in language of advertising because they want to know how

particular language works in this type of discourse, which linguistic means are used here

and how advertising language is changing in the course time.

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I have no ambition to make an analysis of language of adverting from all aspects such as

phonological, lexical and morphological, syntactic and semantic aspect. Within the scope

of my study in this thesis, I only focus on the sentence patterns used in advertisements. AN

INVESTIGATION INTO THE SENTENCE PATTERNS USED IN TRAVLE

ADVERTISEMENTS ON ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE WEBSITES is the study of

what kinds of sentences are presented in the mass media – websites.

2. Aims of the study

In this thesis, the hypothesis and the research questions are:

- What are the features of travel advertising sentences used in English and

Vietnamese websites?

- To what extent are the identified characteristic features similar and different

between English and Vietnamese? Are they due to the social and cultural

influences on the advertisement writers?

- What suggestions should be noted for teaching and learning about travel

advertisements?

3. Research methods and process of research

In order to demonstrate the features of sentence patterns used on website advertisements, I

combine qualitative and quantitative analysis. According to Nunan (1992) (adapted from

Richard and Cook, 1979), a qualitative research is a naturalistic and uncontrolled

observation, subjective, grounded, discovery-oriented, exploratory, descriptive and

inductive (p. 4). Maykut and Morehouse (1994) define qualitative research as generally

examining people’s words and actions in narrative or descriptive ways more closely

representing the situation as experienced by the participants. The aim of qualitative

research is to discover meanings that emerge after close observation, careful

documentation, and thoughtful analysis.

The qualitative method is used to gather data. The data are then analyzed both qualitatively

and quantitatively in terms of the mean length. When studying the features of sentence

patterns used, as a result of quantification, we can look for recurring patterns emerging

from the data.

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First I collect data for study from the internet, including advertisements written in English

and those written in Vietnamese. The two sources then are to be investigated from a cross

– linguistic perspective to study the similarities and differences between the sentence

patterns of the two languages.

On the ground of the findings in this stage of investigation, the texts in advertisements are

randomly chosen and closely analyzed to serve the goals and aims of the study.

4. Scope of the study

The study deals with sentence patterns used in travel advertisements on English and

Vietnamese websites. The data for the study consists of texts from advertisements on

English and Vietnamese websites. My areas of interest are the passages advertising

specific tourist attractions in cities. The travel advertisements selected here are, therefore,

about different places in some foreign countries and Vietnam.

Due to a shortage of time and within the limitation of an M.A thesis, the study only focuses

on the analysis and comparison of 10 travel advertisements in each language.

5. Design of the study

The introduction of the study is aimed to give the background of the study. It mentions the

rationale, aims of the study, the research methods, scope of the study and the process of

research.

The development part of the thesis consists of three chapters:

Chapter 1 deals with theoretical background, giving sentence definitions, functions of

sentences and discourse of advertising.

Chapter 2 presents the sentence patterns used in English and Vietnamese advertisements

including sentence types and sentence structure.

Chapter 3 discusses the similar and different features in sentence patterns of the two

languages in travel advertisements and implications for teaching and learning about travel

advertisements.

The conclusion works out with some findings and suggestions from the research.

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CHAPTER 1

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1.1. What is a sentence?

1.1.1. Definitions

There is a variety of definitions of a sentence. McDougal Littell (2004) simply defines a

sentence is a group of words that conveys a complete thought (p. 36). Brown, Nilson,

Shaw & Weldon (1984) share the same and add some more information: “a sentence is a

group of words that expresses a complete thought. The purpose of a sentence is to describe

an action or state a condition of a person, a place, a thing or an idea.” (p. 57)

Halliday (1994) argues that “describing a sentence as a construction of words is rather like

describing a house as a construction of bricks, without recognizing the walls and the rooms

as intermediate structural units.” (p. 180). He states that a sentence should be defined as a

clause complex with the simple sentence (one clause) as the limiting case.

Morley (2000, p.25) looks at a sentence in many aspects. In meaning terms, he says “the

role of the sentence is to express one or more ideas or ‘proposition’ from the ideational

component, each proposition being realized by a clause.”

Nguyễn Hòa (2001) says “…the sentence refers to the system or language side: it can be

thought of as the ideal structure behind various realizations in utterances.” (p. 23)

Mai Ngọc Chừ, Vũ Đức Nghiệu & Hoàng Trọng Phiến (2006) give out the definition about

a sentence: “câu là đơn vị của ngôn ngữ có cấu tạo ngữ pháp (bên trong và bên ngoài) tự

lập và có ngữ điệu kết thúc, mang một tư tưởng tương đối trọn vẹn có kèm thái độ của

người nói hoặc chỉ biểu thị thái độ của người nói, giúp hình thành và biểu hiện, truyền đạt

tư tưởng, tình cảm với tư cách là đơn vị thông báo nhỏ nhất.” (p. 285)

(A sentence is the language unit which has independent inner and outer grammatical

structure and ending intonation. It bears a relatively complete thought enclosed with the

speaker’s attitude or only displaying the speaker’s attitude, which helps form, show and

communicate ideas and affection as the smallest information unit.)

I myself like and follow the definition of Richards and Platt (1992) about a sentence: “the

largest unit of grammatical organization within with parts of speech (e.g. nouns, verbs,

adverbs) and grammatical classes (e.g. word, phrase, clause) are said to function. In

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