MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI OPEN UNVERSITY

LÊ THỊ TÂM

A STUDY ON LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF
COSMETIC PRODUCT ADVERTISEMENTS IN ENGLISH
AND THEIR VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS
(NGHIÊN CỨU ĐẶC ĐIỂM TỪ VỰNG VÀ CÚ PHÁP CỦA
QUẢNG CÁO MỸ PHẨM TRONG TIẾNG ANH VÀ CÁC
TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG TIẾNG VIỆT)

M.A. THESIS
Field: English Language
Code: 60220201

Hanoi, 2015


MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI OPEN UNVERSITY

LÊ THỊ TÂM

A STUDY ON LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF
COSMETIC PRODUCT ADVERTISEMENTS IN ENGLISH
AND THEIR VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS
(NGHIÊN CỨU ĐẶC ĐIỂM TỪ VỰNG VÀ CÚ PHÁP CỦA
QUẢNG CÁO MỸ PHẨM TRONG TIẾNG ANH VÀ CÁC
TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG TIẾNG VIỆT)
M.A. THESIS

This thesis could not have been completed without the help and
support from a number of people.
First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to
Ms. Nguyễn Thị Vân Đông, my supervisor, who has patiently and
constantly supported me through the stages of the study, and whose
stimulating ideas, expertise, and suggestions have inspired me greatly
through my growth as an academic researcher.
A special word of thanks goes to my friends and many others, without
whose support and encouragement it would have been impossible for me to
have this thesis accomplished.
Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family for the sacrifice
they have devoted to the fulfillment of this academic work.

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ABSTRACT
This study aims at conducting a study of advertisements for cosmetic
products in English and their Vietnamese equivalents. The data for analysis
in this thesis are 130 samples of advertisements for cosmetic products (100
in English and 30 in Vietnamese) collected from many different sources
such as magazines, television, catalogs and websites of companies
manufacturing cosmetic products in the United States, United Kingdom and
in Vietnam. The study is carried out based on the theories of lexis, syntax
and a combination of a variety of methods such as descriptive, comparative,
contrastive, analytic and inductive. The study focuses on analyzing some
typical linguistic features in order to point out the equivalents between
advertisements for cosmetic products in English and Vietnamese in terms of
their lexical features and syntactic features. The findings of this study are
clearly presented based on a survey of 100 English advertisements for


advertisements for cosmetic products
Table 4.3. Adjectives in English and Vietnamese advertisements for

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cosmetic products
Table 4.4. Ellipsis in English and Vietnamese advertisements for

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cosmetic products
Table 4.5. Imperative Sentences in English and Vietnamese

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advertisements for cosmetic products

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: The distribution of lexical features in CpAE and CpAV

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Figure 2: The distribution of syntactic features in CpAE and CpAV

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3.1. Research-governing orientations
3.1.1. Research questions
3.1.2. Research approaches
3.1.3. Description of samples
3.2. Research methods
3.2.1. Major methods vs. supporting methods
3.2.2. Data collection techniques
3.2.3. Data analysis techniques
3.3. Summary
Chapter 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
4.1. Lexical features of English advertisements for cosmetic products
and their Vietnamese equivalents
4.1.1. Lexical features
4.1.1.1. Using verbs

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4.2. Syntactic features of English advertisements for cosmetic
products and their Vietnamese equivalents
4.2.1. Syntactic features
4.2.1.1. Using simple Sentences
4.2.1.2. Using ellipsis in declarative Sentences
4.2.1.3. Using imperative Sentences
4.2.2. Similarities
4.2.3. Differences
4.3. Possible implications for teaching and learning English for
students majoring in advertising and marketing in Academy of
Journalism and Communication
Chapter 5: CONCLUSION
5.1. Concluding remarks
5.2. Limitations of the research
5.3. Suggestions for further research
REFERENCES

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an advertisement or another. On our way to school or office, we come
across advertisements in various shapes or colors. Indeed, advertising,
whether print, broadcast, or any other type, is part of our everyday lives. By
means of its linguistic power, advertising has placed a strong effect on
social life and language style. Advertising brings the benefits to not only
manufacturers but also consumers. Through advertisements, manufacturers
1


can effectively attract people’s attention to their products. As a result, they
will sell more products. Besides that, advertising is useful to consumers.
Thanks to advertisements, consumers get information about products and
services. They know about the characteristics, benefits of each product or
service in order to make a good choice.
In advertising, language is very important because it helps people to
identify the product and remember it. Language in advertising as a tool of
communication is used to deliver specific messages with the intention of
influencing, convincing, and informing people. These specific messages
mostly aim to persuade people to buy certain products or services.
Advertising in the field of cosmetic products is not an exception. In fact,
words, phrases and sentences are used in advertising to convey information,
to influence attitudes and to affect behavior. Selecting appropriate words
and expressions to accomplish the advertiser’s objectives are important in
creating strong impressions on readers and persuade them to buy products
by bringing the products to potential customers. Cosmetic advertisements
are quite popular in all means of media. Actually, cosmetic advertisers bring
the products to customers in different ways which depend mostly on who
the customers are. In other words, they design different advertisements of
the same product to target different groups of viewers, namely men and
women. Good advertisements for cosmetic products must first grab the

linguistic features of English advertisements for cosmetic products.
1.3.

Objectives of the study

The objectives of the study are:
- To analyze the lexical features of cosmetic product advertisements in
English and their Vietnamese equivalents.
- To discover the syntactic features of cosmetic product advertisements in
English and their Vietnamese equivalents.

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- To suggest some possible implications for teaching and learning English
for students majoring in advertising and marketing in Academy of
Journalism and Communication.
1.4.

Scope of the study
All the advertisements investigated in this study are taken from many

different famous cosmetic brands which are very popular in the market. The
research is restricted to some linguistic features such as lexical and syntactic
features of written English advertisements for cosmetic products and their
Vietnamese equivalents collected from many different sources such as
magazines, television, catalogs and websites of companies manufacturing
cosmetic products in the United States, United Kingdom and in Vietnam.
1.5.



Apart from the abstracts, the references, the research consists of five
chapters as follows:
Chapter 1, entitled “INTRODUCTION”, outlines the background of
the study. In this chapter, a brief account of relevant information is provided
about the rationale, aims, objectives, scopes, significance of the research,
and design of the study.
Chapter 2, “LITERATURE REVIEW”, is considered as a slight
overview of the previous studies related to the problem under investigation.
It provides the theoretical background of the study as theory of lexical and
syntactic features, an overview of advertising and cosmetic products
advertising.
Chapter 3, the methodology, refers to the researching approach of the
study and the method to collect and analyze the collected data to help the
author achieve the best results in the study.
Chapter 4, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS, is the most important
part in the study, discusses the findings concerning the lexical and syntactic
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features of cosmetic product advertisements in English and their Vietnamese
equivalents and mentions the possible implications for using and practicing
English.
The last chapter is Chapter 5, the conclusion of the study; this chapter
summarizes the research findings, and points out the limitations of the
study. Some suggestions for further research are also presented in this
chapter.

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advertisements’ textual and contextual features. Also, in this book, he
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discusses the interaction between advertising messages and their
surroundings are discussed and show their influence on the effectiveness of
the advertising.
Besides, some Vietnamese linguists approached advertising and
advertising language and examined the related issue in a number of studies.
Ton Nu My Nhat (22) provided a description of lexicon-grammatical
features in travel advertisements in the light of Halliday’s functionalsystematic grammar. She also reviewed literature on discourse analysis and
proposed an analytical framework for the linguistic description of this
specific advertising genre. The thesis of Mai Xuan Huy (2001) is the first
project in Vietnam surveyed and studied of the characteristics of advertising
language fully and entirely. Moreover, this is also the first project
approached advertising language from communication theory-pragmatics, a
new theory to almost Vietnamese linguistics in Vietnam. By researching
semantics-pragmatics of advertising discourse, the thesis determined the
mechanism to communicate in the language or the campaign of advertisers
in advertising discourse. Thereby, the thesis also found some interesting
semantics-pragmatics issues of Vietnamese in advertising discourse. Tran
Thi Thu Hien (31) researched, analyzed, and contrasted systematically
advertising language in printed newspapers in Vietnamese and English in
order to find the stylistic characteristics of the Vietnamese advertising
language in terms of lexis, semantics, grammar and text. Through the
stylistic characteristics, she defined the style and function of advertising
which have not been unified before. According to Bui Diem Hanh (2013),
The studying the rationale of the advertisement, the means and semantics
methods with the advertising model determined the syntax, semantics,
pragmatics in the types of advertisement in Vietnamese and new theoretical

Formally,

in linguistics,

a

lexicon is

a

language's

inventory

of lexemes. Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as
9


consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's
words (its word-stock); and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for
the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is
also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as
words (such as most affixes). In some analyses, compound words and
certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other collocations are also
considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries represent attempts at
listing, in alphabetical order, the lexicon of a given language; usually,
however, bound morphemes are not included (34).
The lexicon is the bridge between a language and the knowledge
expressed in that language. Every language has a different vocabulary, but
every language provides the grammatical mechanisms for combining its

Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such
as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a
rock too but he missed).
The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or
sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up
of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols
called graphemes, such as the letters of the English alphabet (37).
Types of Words
There are thousands of words in any language. But not all words have
the same job. For example, some words express "action". Other words
express a "thing". Other words "join" one word to another word. And when
we want to build a sentence, we use the different types of word. Each type
11


of word has its own job. We can categorize English words into eight basic
types or classes. These classes are called "parts of speech".
Eight types of word ("word classes" or "parts of speech") are
distinguished in English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs,

prepositions, and conjunctions. (Determiners, traditionally

classified along with adjectives, have not always been regarded as a separate
part of speech.) Interjections are another word class, but these are not
described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure
of the language.
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open classes-word classes
that readily accept new members, such as the noun celebutante (a celebrity
who frequents the fashion circles), similar relatively new words. The others

English language were given a capital letter. In English now, only proper
nouns are given capital letters.
•

Adjective: Words that modify nouns by adding to their meanings

(e.g. That was a long film). Most adjectives have comparative (I’m glad it
wasn’t any longer) and Superlative forms (It was the longest film I’ve ever
seen).
Noun, verb, adjective and adverb are referred to as open-class
because “they are open-ended and can be added to readily” (Jeffries, 2006,
p. 83), but they are also often referred to as lexical words because they carry
a lexical meaning (sometimes they are even referred to as semantic words,
for the same reason). Sara Thorne goes on to say: New words can be added
to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as they become necessary,
developing language to match changes in the society around us. The
computer age, for example, has introduced new words like hardware,
software, CD-ROM and spreadsheet; the 1980s introduced words like
Rambo, kissogram and wimp; the 1990s introduced words like babelicious,
alcopop and e-verdict; and the twenty-first century words like bling, chav,
sudoko, bluetooth, chuggers (“charity muggers”), mediatrics (“media
dramatics” i.e. a story created from nothing), and doorstepping (journalists
catching celebrities on their doorsteps to question them about incidents they
would prefer not to discuss). Open-class words are often called lexical
13


words and have a clearly definable meaning (Sara Thorne, 2008, p. 4).
Closed-class words, or grammatical words or functional words
If open-class words tend to change frequently, then closed-class

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consequence of the other (although, as, because, if, since, that, though, until,
where, when, while, etc.).
•

Pronouns: Pronouns come in two forms. Firstly, the pronoun itself,

where words are “used instead of a noun or noun phrase (e.g. it, he, who,
theirs)”. Secondly, there is the personal pronoun, in which “words identify
speakers, addressees and others (I, you, she, it, we, they)” (Stott and
Chapman, 2001).
2.2.1.2.

Syntax

Notion of Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that
govern the structure of sentences in a given language. The term syntax is
also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of
many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all
languages (36).
The part of grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of
sentences and their structure is called syntax. Syntax specifies the correct
word order for a language. All languages have mechanisms like syntax to
make a limitless number of sentences. This is a characteristic shared by all
speakers of a language. Syntax also specifies the grammatical relationship
of a sentence.
Examples: subject and direct object: Who is doing what to whom?