Structural Patterns and Grammatical Complexity of Tourism Slogans
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Abstract
Tourism slogans play an important role in promoting tourism businesses, yet research on their syntactic features remains scarce. To fill this gap, this study investigated the syntax of 465 hospitality and travel slogans from the website “database of advertising slogans”, adopting Huddleston and Pullum's framework of structural patterns and Biber et al.’s framework of grammatical complexity. The results revealed that the structural patterns of most slogans were single-unit. Noun phrases, especially with attributive adjectives, were the most frequent phrase type, whereas clauses were mainly declarative or imperative. Most clauses were canonical in form, although some used packaging constructions to create emphasis. Regarding grammatical complexity, the slogans showed a tendency towards a compressed and implicit style, with dependent phrases being more frequent than dependent clauses. Adjective phrases as noun premodifiers were the most prevalent among the former, while non-finite complement clauses were the most common among the latter. These findings indicate that tourism slogans favor brevity, positivity, and memorability, strategically employing simple but implicit grammatical resources to persuade and engage audiences. Extending grammatical complexity theory beyond academic discourse, this study provides empirically grounded insight into how grammatical structures are selectively employed in professional promotional discourse, reflecting authentic usage patterns in applied contexts and informing the design of ESP teaching materials, particularly those focusing on tourism-slogan syntax.
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