COMMUNICATION (Ms Nguyen)

Communicating is an essential part in our daily life. People have a great variety of ways to exchange their thoughts, which may be made through language, signs, gestures, body language, and so on. However, language proves to be the most effective means, for it is capable of conveying all what you want while the others might sometimes be impossible. Advertising is among the many ways of conveying ideas in which language plays a very important role.

Whenever you speak or write something, you make phrases and sentences in such a way that it makes sense to the listener(s) or the reader(s), though you may not be aware of this. And this is the role of syntax - studying the structures of phrases and sentences. In addition, “part of the business of semantics is to deal with ways in which syntactic structures can be interpreted. Some scholars assume that for each syntactic rule determining how two or more constituents are put together, there is a corresponding semantic rule determining how the receptive meanings are to be composed”. [14, p.27- 28]

Knowing well the semantic and syntactic rules of a language does not necessarily mean having mastered its uses. In some situation, a sentence someone makes can be unnatural or unacceptable though it is grammatically correct. This is the matter of collocations. “Collocation is the way words combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing”. Collocation runs through the whole of the English language, as in any other languages. No piece of naturally spoken or written English is totally free of collocation. Choosing the right collocation will make the speech and writing more natural and more native-like [19]. For instance, in English you say strong wind but heavy rain” [19, vii], though strong and heavy here both mean a lot. You may say strong rain and can be understood but of course it does not sound natural and sometimes your speech provokes a smile. Similarly, we often see in some advertisements such collocations as smooth hair / smooth skin in English but in Vietnamese mái tóc suông/ làn da mịn màng not làn da suông. This may not be a matter at all to native speakers. How a word goes with another is of no question to them because they are living in the language environment and their language competence is the result of what they have acquired since their very early ages. They are even unaware of the fact that they are using collocations. On the contrary, learners of English find it troublesome because there is no rule for them to know which goes with which. And this creates a lot of difficulties for every language learner.

Advertising is crucial in our modern society. It is designed to promote the sale of a product or service... Since advertising is catchy and persuasive, advertisers tend to vary their ways and language so as to draw the attention of the potential consumers. This leads to the use of many different collocations in advertising the same product or service