Holiday Advertisement (Attempt)

This holiday advertisement i can assume is being displayed in a travel agents window and is therefore designed for quick and easy viewing. The advert persuades viewers to stay local instead of venturing to Italy and tactically compares aspects of both areas such as shape of country and beauty of women as a means of persuasion. From this i can assume the out datedness of this advert as using women as a way of luring customers would now be seen as demeaning and tasteless when done so forthright, where as in this day and age the subtle use of the image of women is used instead of displayed verbally.

 Accompanying this use of women is the semantic field of beauty with "in shape, climate and natural beauty" this suggests it's not only talking about the landscape of each area but the women that live there, suggesting their women are fit, hot and beautiful, suggesting that if they were to visit Cornwall the women would be plentiful for which they could choose, showing the  possessive attitudes to women in that time.

The syntax is kept simple to reflect how easy it'd be to go on holiday in your own country, an attractive quality and a point of persuasion to stay close to home. There is also no use of punctuation also adding to the simplistic nature of this advert.

Assuming the date of this text, a great amount of national pride would be taken for Britain, which supports the use of personal persuasive pronouns such as "your" and "own" to arguably guilt the viewer into considering a holiday in Cornwall from feeling like they aren't taking advantage of beautiful landscape right on their doorstep. At this point in time money would not have been plentiful and a big emphasis was put on using what you have to its full ability and not to waste, where as in this age no expensive is spared on a family holiday.

Child Directed Speech (Blog Copy)

 As Katherine has not yet developed to a complex enough cognitive level she misses auxiliary verbs and has no sense of awareness when it comes to contractions resulting in Katherine saying “I stuck” her mother recasts her sentence in “You’re” stuck in the hope of Katherine learning from social interaction, a theory put forward by Vygotsky as a means of language acquisition.  However, in some instances her mother does not correct her as I assume her mother wants to keep the learning experience a positive one to avoid stunting Katherine's growth lexically as a result of her feeling scared of being reprimanded. Whilst doing so Katherine's mother uses repeated sentence frames to make conversation predictable and easier to understand for Katherine, for example “You have got your socks on. What colour are your socks?” the use of questions are to stimulate the mind and for Katherine to develop her lexicon and further to reflect Katherine's mothers success with parenthood to other parents.

Katherine's mother also expands Katherine's utterances for example “And (2) Red and what?” encouraging her daughter to explore her lexicon and making it more likely for her to develop through the proximal zones of development. When Katherine correctly answers one of her mother’s questions, Kathrine’s mother responds with positive reinforcement praising her daughter, Skinner suggests this positive reinforcement would make Katherine's behaviour more likely repeated and exploration and furthermore learning as a result more probable. From the transcript we can assume a higher pitch and intonation present making the learning experience exciting as children want to impress those seen as an authority figure.

Orthographical & Punctuation Advertisement Task

It has to be said, from flicking through various magazines I struggled to find any advertisements with punctuation or orthographical mistakes... I can only assume as these were high end magazines such tacky tactics of engaging a higher intelligence audience would have failed and perhaps had the opposite effect by deterring potential customers, after all, tacky advertisement equals tacky product.

Here are some examples of advertisements I found, one thing I have noticed is that playing around with capitalisation is quite common.

Context:Vogue Advertisement   Audience: Considerably wealthy women    Purpose: Persuade/Flatter

Whether capitalisation is a matter of style or grammar is arguable, I believe it to be, from a linguistic standpoint, style, as its subject to fashions and whims of certain ages in ways that many aspects of grammar, aren't. This therefore reflects the audience of the product (Red Lipstick) young-middle aged women as the confrontational atmosphere that capitalisation brings for a vibrant and youthful mood and perhaps, audience. Another aspect I find interesting, is that the word red has been replaced with the French translation, this I can only assume is the affect of pretentious writers seeking everyway possible to make every inch of their product luxurious as the readers, perhaps causing flattery in return. Using the mix between English and French adds to the profile of the moderately priced brand as it suggests intricacy making it fit more smoothly into the discourse structure of continuously extortionately priced luxurious designers page after page. I feel that the presence of much higher end product also using the tactic of "Rouge" confirms my suspicions of L'Oreal feeling the need to compete with Vogues high standards and norms.

Context:Vogue Article   Audience: Middle aged women    Purpose: Entertain

One spelling mistake that was purposefully used however was this articles title, suggesting Vogue and perhaps other high end magazines have formed an etiquette for orthographical errors, allowing such tactics leeway in terms of articles where skill of articulation throughout the piece rectifies any damage done . Needless to explore that the slang "kid" was misspelt "Kidd" as a result of the coincidence of the individuals last name being so. In terms of affect, I believe it gives the reader a mere smirk at best and although in no way does a writer have to be clever to come up with the pun (if you could even call it that) it gives the title a sense of charm especially accompanied with the pronoun "our" creating a semantic field of family which the reader, for this article, middle aged women would find endearing, stereotypically of course.

How do I think children learn language?

I believe language aquisition to be a cocktail of innate potential and environmental factors. I concur this from various case studies, that I believe to be the most important evidence in studying language aquisition  (as the same amount of generalisability can't be said for studies with pigeons). Genie, is an example of extreme environmental factors stunting growth verbally, although she did later learn a vast lexicon the part of the brain important for forming sentences had not been stimulated at the critical period  and consequently disconnected meaning genie would never reach the expected verbal ability of an individual that hadn't experienced trauma. This study suggests we are a born with innate ability to learn words, however this ability is highly potential based and after all language isn't just words, language is sentences and relies highly on an internal clock with biological programmed critical periods. 

A study that challenges this is the case of the Czech twins, of whom were locked in the basement of their home by their stepmother and subjected to emense traumar which stunted growth cognitively, lexically and physically. Another is the case study of the ukranian ferile child raised by dogs, who upon savour only growled and appeared to have no lexicon or ability of language at all. Despite these cases both went on to develop cognitively and achieve their full potential. This then suggests that environmental factors can be reversed and biological factors are more substantial. However it is to be noted that neither of the arguing cases were as extreme isolation as Genie and both the Czech twins and the Ukrainian dog child had been exposed to some form of language from social interaction before isolation, which may prove to be a contributing factor to their recovery.

Difference between descriptivism and prescriptvism

Presciptivism
Favour rules that identify "correct" language use, they disapprove of uses of language that break the traditional rules. Established in 18th century in efforts to standardise language.

Descriptivism
Seek to describe as accurately and objectively as possible, how language is actually used. They do not label particular uses of language correct or incorrect.

Documentary Analysis

The left part of the brain is for language, the front part for speaking and the back part is for understanding

language relies on many different cognitive processes

Language is  supposidly innate (enviromental factors can affect)

Animals cannot speak like humans due to their different anatomy

There is a gene which allows us to create words and sequences.

The brain and language are syncronised

Normal song was created by the finches despite never hearing it

Mills and Boon "Romance" (erotic) novel

The female gender is represented as clearly a stereotypical cliche of erotic novels although this isnt always seen as a sexist trend as its a womans erotic novel it's aimed at those with a certain influence of  dominating fetish not so much a social stamp of the worlds views of woman. This is clearly demonstrated by the use of actor and affected, the actor (male) doing to which he pleases the woman (affected) to give the image of control firmly fixated on the males part and the vunerable damsel in distress on the woman for example "they stared deep into her soul" shows the hierachy of power in terms of gender with the male clearly leaving the woman vunerable. This is peculiar as its accompanied by modern manipulation of roles, where as before these books would see a sucsessful man with a less so woman, the herorine in this extract is made out of a doctor- breaking free of previous cliches and shifting the balancing scales of representation of gender to  better women.