Syntactic Analysis of Online Tourism Slogans: Frequency, Forms and Functions

Abstract

Tourism has been growing fast as a global industry. Promoting national tourism is therefore an important part of a country's economic plan and can contribute to its economic success. Tourism slogans have always been part of the promotion of national tourism. Almost every country has their own catchy, pungent taglines to attract new tourists. This study examined 100 tourism slogans available online and investigated the frequency of occurrences of the syntactic structures in the slogans. After the most frequently used syntactic structures were identified, they were analysed further for classifications of sentence types and structures in order to gain insight into patterns of grammatical forms and functions. The findings showed that in terms of occurrences, noun phrases were most frequently used in tourism slogans, followed by simple declarative sentences. Further analysis demonstrated that the most common form of noun phrase in the tourism slogans consisted of an adjective (modifier) and a noun (head). In addition, the most common form of sentence was declarative and its function was to make a statement. Other interesting findings such as linguistic playfulness and incongruence of forms and functions were also discussed in the study