A Morphological Analysis of Tourism Slogans

Objectives: Language plays a crucial role in media and advertising slogans. Catchy and memorable tourism slogans can promote destinations and help marketing information be accepted and remembered by customers. They also help create brand awareness, and improve brand image and brand recognition. Because of this, word selection and word formation are factors that lead to successful slogans. The purpose of this study was to examine the morphological operations of the content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) used in tourism slogans. Methods: The data were collected from the website “database of advertising slogans” and the LancsBox program was used to classify the content words found into four parts of speech. After this, the researchers analyzed and categorized them into different word-formation processes. Finally, the results were recorded in Excel files to demonstrate the frequency of their occurrences. Results: By employing Huddleston and Pullum’s (2005) theoretical framework, the results showed that firstly, when comparing the occurrences of derivation and compounding among the four parts of speech, both processes appeared most frequently in the group of nouns. However, when comparing within the same word classes, the occurrences of derivation were higher than those of compounding in the groups of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. For derivation by affixation, the occurrence of suffixation was the highest (46.30%). In addition, the top three prefixes found in this analysis were re-, de-, and ex-. In terms of suffixation, -ing was the noun suffix appearing most frequently (16.67%), with -al having the highest adjective-forming occurrence (15.63 %). For derivation by non-affixation, noun to verb conversion was found most frequently (89.62%). In compounding terms, the compound words consisting of 2 bases were found most frequently (64.95%), and the structure (X + X) + X had the highest frequency (76.47%). Application of this study: This study is beneficial to teachers teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) courses and can be used as a case study in linguistics courses. Furthermore, in terms of business and marketing, this study can provide useful information for copywriters and marketers whose main jobs are to create effective advertising slogans.