Comparative Systematic Analysis of Menus.

Menu A (Wayfarer Cafe) has a purpose to inform passing Truck drivers of the food available and is written in an elliptical style. Whereas, Menu B (The Ravenscroft Suite Gourmet Dinner Dance) is aimed at upper class adults with an interest in cuisine, because of this, the menu is still informative but also slightly persuasive.

The graphology of both A and B is chronologically sectioned. In A the first section of the menu is dedicated to breakfast meals and continues into main meals, puddings and snacks. Similarly, B is also chronologically listed between starters and main courses, each meal separated by a consigned number of asterisks. The aesthetics of this menu remain consistent throughout. On the other hand, the entirety of A is written in capitals, this gives a less professional aesthetic which would suitably reflect the target audience and context.

Menu A uses a lot of abbreviated language such as “B/FAST”, this connotes the colloquialism of the café, but also the context of the drivers only having a limited amount of time to read the menu and select their food based on the visible key words. As a consequence of this there are also omitted prepositions such as “pot tea” instead of ‘pot of tea’. To further extenuate the informality of the menu, there are many symbols used in the place of words, especially conjunctions. A separate example of this is where the symbol “2” is used in place of ‘two’ to decrease the size of the menu. Generally, only simplified language is used and a lot of high frequency words such as ‘chips’. Other examples of types of lexis include certain dialect, “parkin” and “barm” are words that would only be understood in the Manchester area.

Menu B’s language is much more complex, it features pre-modification and post-modification “An interesting warm salad of smoked bacon, wild mushrooms and duck”. Other lexis used can sometimes appear out of context such as “attentively” would generally not be a word featured on a food menu. There is also a semantic field of French vocabulary used, with six words from throughout fitting into this category. The upper class context of the menu is connoted from the description of the food such as “enrobed in crepinette”. There are also noun phrases used such as “peeled prawns”, which is ensued by post modification, this would make the menu appear more enticing to the audience as by not following a generic sentence structure, any reading rhythm would be lost and subsequently force them to be more attentive of the menu.

How Sophie's language has developed from the telegraphic stage to the post telegraphic stage.

At the age of two years and four months, Sophie is in the early telegraphic stage. It is shown that Sophie has progressed from the two word stage as she is using a larger combination of words in each phrase and this is how I can tell she is still in the early telegraphic. She uses a large amount of possessive pronouns; ‘me’ with a minority of ‘I’. From Ursula Bellugi’s theory on development of pronouns you can tell she is in Stage 2 of pronouns, which is when the child uses me or I in a sentence but interchanges them. Sophie also proves Stage 1 or Bellugi’s other theory by using ‘no’ at the beginning of a phrase which also shows she has only just moved on from the two word stage “no I got any hoover”.

At three years and five months, Sophie’s language has developed into the post telegraphic stage. She has begun to use more complex pronouns such as ‘her’ and to further develop her language onto the definite article. Sophie has also moved onto stage 3 of Bellugi as she negates using an auxiliary verb. However, she still uses child-like language in the form of ellipsis where she says “corder” instead of recorder. Her use of language has also become more complex as she is now capable of correctly using modal auxiliaries and prepositions.

The main development in Sophie’s language is shown through her sentence structure. In the post telegraphic stage she has used a conjunction to form a compound sentence, “I want to ring up somebody and her won’t be there tomorrow”. In addition, her use of time phrases “after lunch” correlates which her developed language. This shows how her acquisition of language is linked to cognitive development.     

General Basis of Language Investigation

My English Language Investigation will be based around whether the language used in print smoking adverts correlates with the attitude at the time. My hypothesis will be something such as how more rhetorical questions will be used in older adverts, there will be more synthetic personalisation in more recent adverts and how more recent adverts will revolve around the graphology. Also mainly about how there will be predominately positive lexis in older adverts and negative in recent adverts, also how there is epistemic and deontic verbs.

 My area of theory is language and power and the main theories I am going to feature are the face theory, influential power and Fairclough’s theory. The frameworks I will be looking out for are rhetorical questions, the graphology, persuasive language, synthetic personalisation, the use of verbs and semantic fields.

The data I am going to collect will be total six adverts, two from each of the following decades: the sixties, eighties and the beginning of the twenty first century. I am yet to decide how I am going to select them. I feel this will be enough to have a reliable outcome at the end of my investigation.  My comparability factors will be that they are from the same decade and feature the same product/area focus. Things I am yet to take into consideration are that they could all be from a specific part of publishing (eg a magazine, newspaper) and what country the product is from (mainly UK or America). The factors I could be contrasting are the brands of cigarette, whether the advert is for or against smoking and how some adverts could be selling cigarettes and others may be preventing smoking/looking at the health of smoking. The reliability factors will be ensuring the two adverts from the decade will be enough to get the overall attitude and to make sure I don’t have any anomalous adverts from the decade.