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.