No abstract

Trademarks are important for business establishments because they express the origin and quality of the companies, but it is not always easy to know and employ linguistic elements to craft good trademarks. Thus, to see the linguistic characteristics and strength of trademarks, the study has an objective to examine the trademarks of selected buffet restaurants at SM Mall of Asia, in Pasay, Metro Manila, Philippines. The data were taken from nine buffet restaurants. The analysis was done by referring to Shuy’s (2002) linguistic tools and Butters’ (2010) framework. The findings reveal that the linguistic characteristics mainly used by the buffet restaurants were lexicography, phonetics, morphology, and semantics. In terms of lexicography, most trademarks have their etymological meaning and historical development in the dictionaries, except Charaptor and Yakimix, which are coined words. In phonetics, the trademarks have phonetic characteristics of 1-3 syllables. Then the morphological analysis shows that the trademarks consist of noun phrases, affixation, and word formation (clipping). In semantics, five trademarks do not have synonyms and polysemy; three have synonyms, and two have polysemy. In terms of strength, the trademarks were classified from the weak to the strongest as follows: Buffet 101 (descriptive); Cabalen, La Fiesta, Oceana (suggestive); Four Seasons, Vikings (arbitrary); and Charaptor, GEN, Yakimix (fanciful). The findings imply that business owners need to create their companies’ trademarks in arbitrary or fanciful categories.

This paper describes a contrastive study of the Philippine and Indonesian newspaper editorials in order to see similarities and differences in their physical size in terms of words and how Filipino and Indonesian editorialists utilized their discourse strategies through metadiscourse markers. To this end, 30 editorials of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Jakarta Post were examined through the lens of contrastive rhetoric analysis. The investigation of metadiscourse devices was grounded on the metadiscourse framework of Hyland (2005). Regarding the length of the editorials, the data revealed that the Philippine editorials employed more words compared to the Indonesian ones. The findings also show that both groups of editorialists used more interactional category, especially subcategory attitude markers in their writing, although the frequencies of the counts were different. The Philippine editorials contain more metadiscourse markers in all subcategories compared to the Indonesian editorials. The findings may indicate that as a genre, newspaper editorials have a generic feature of metadicourse markers, namely attitude markers. By using attitude markers effectively, editorialists make clear their stance on particular public issues and try to persuade readers to accept the opinion of the newspaper editors. The study shows that newspaper editorials are reader-oriented texts.