INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale Nowadays, in a developed world, thousands of new products and services are introduced each day, which makes advertising become a real art - the art of informing and persuading customers. Slogans can be considered the heart of advertisements wherever they appear. Slogans are the most important and condensed messages advertisers would like to send to their customers. Sharp and intelligent slogans can help advertisers leave unforgettable impressions on their potential customers’ minds. However, creating a successful slogan is never an easy task. The use of just a few words in a slogan proves to be harder than it appears. It requires a sophisticated linguistic insight of phonology, lexicology, syntax as well as semantics and pragmatics. Hence, the study on some successful slogans promises a lot of interesting facts in the art of using language among advertisers. On the other hand, what can be called a successful slogan is still a question. The answer depends on the area of products and services the slogan is used for, the country or geographical regions it is used in and maybe the population of its target customers. Therefore, choosing one kind of products or services to study the slogans used in it should bring more thorough and detailed results of aspects of language exploited. The advertising slogans of some world-famous airlines are chosen to investigate in this study for two main reasons. First of all, when the airlines can be called famous, they must be successful in many aspects. They may provide services of elegant quality. Or they may have a long history of building their own prestige and class. But one thing that can be ensured is their successful advertising campaigns in which slogans play a vital part. The investigation into those slogans will hopefully reveal interesting features in language used in slogans in general and airline slogans in particular. Second, world-famous airlines have a wide scope of activities with customers coming from all over the world and. Thus, the language they use must be of common values and highly appreciated by many customers. There is no case of “accident slogans” which cause failure in advertising campaigns due to differences in cultural values and perceptions. 1.2 Aims and Objectives of the Study The objective of this study is to investigate the phonological, lexical, semantic and syntactic features of airline advertising slogans. Basing on this, the study is hopefully aimed at drawing out some hints for Vietnamese advertisers, especially in airline services, which may help to improve their effectiveness and professionality. 1.3 Scope of the Study ã All the slogans investigated in this study are taken from the advertisements of world-famous airlines, which include national airlines and the biggest ones of some developed countries. ã In this study, syntactic, semantic, phonological, and lexical features of the slogans are extensively discussed. 1.4 Significance of the Study The values of the study lie in both theoretical and practical aspects. Theoretically, the study helps to find out linguistic features used in airlines slogans in particular and in our social life in general. Practically, it helps to find out the effectiveness of those linguistic features when applying to the act of advertising and hopefully suggests some ways of achieving great impression on customers’ minds through the art of using words by advertisers. 1.5 Design of the study The study consists of five chapters. 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, scopes, method, and design of the study. Chapter 2, with the title “LITERATURE REVIEW”, can be considered a slight overview of some previous researches on the same subject both in English and Vietnamese. At the same time, it gives a theoretical background to this study with theoretical preliminaries directly related to the investigation of English employed in airlines’ advertising slogans, namely discourse, context, genre, register as well as the definitions of advertising and advertising slogans. Chapter 3 – RESEARCH 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 is called MAIN FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS, in which the author summarizes her findings in the characteristics of the English language used in airlines’ advertising slogans and also her conclusions on the percentage of slogans employing those characteristics. The last chapter is Chapter 5 – CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS, which provides the recapitulations, implications of the study to the creating process of advertising slogans in general and airlines’ slogans in particular, and suggestions for further studies. The study ends with the “BIBLIOGRAPHY”.
