What clues can you gather from this list of 50 words on how a baby might acquire language?

A baby I believe would develop its use of language through imitation and repetition of words that are used consistently for a specific meaning. The routine of these words helps to build up the child’s vocabulary, developing the child’s knowledge about the given language.

The child will receive help from guardians and teachers, whose names are likely to be learnt quickly due to the child having the ability to state who their talking to whilst speaking to gain maximum attention and clear direction of message – this would have been learnt through the child observing and participating in conversations (learning the pragmatics). The infant would also gain insight into language through the media. Many TV shows aimed at the kids market target the aspect of ‘learning’ – this is done in a fun, exciting way to make the audience want to learn. Sounds (like onomatopoeias) are used to capture interest and to portray a subject in an easy, memorable form e.g. woof woof = dog.

Whilst studying the 50 words, I discovered that many imperatives have been used. Perhaps this is because the child is at the holophrase stage - yet to develop its language and sounds to form full sentences, so is using body language and direct words to illustrate meaning.

Where will I find data for my subject area of advertising?

* Magazines
* Google images
* Newspapers
* Internet
* TV
* You Tube adverts
* General posters e.g. bus stop adverts
* Leaflets

Potentially useful sites for my topic of advertising...

http://advertising.about.com/od/copywriting/a/The-10-Most-Powerful-Words-In-Advertising.htm

http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/

http://www.superdream.co.uk/best-advertising-slogans/

A2 Personal Investigation ideas...

I would like to investigate the language used within advertisements, though the focal point hasn't been decided upon yet.  I have a few ideas I came up with whilst brainstorming...

1.Look at how different food groups use language to persuade you to buy it - e.g. fruit & vegetables (healthy statistics) and chocolate (imagery of cosy, luxury, delight)

2.How language varies with different types of holidays

3.How language alters with objects of different prices

4.How language changes throughout the seasons

5.How the same product has been presented over a given period of time

            Oxford English Dictionary terms 

1.   New words have entered the English language through ‘borrowing’ whilst being in contact with people of different cultures with diverse languages, for instance ‘The word cushy was borrowed from Urdu by the British military in India’, words were also formed as a description to the conditions they were in.

2.       Whilst reading through the article I had to look up the following words to receive their definition: ‘spike bozzle’ (meaning to badly damage or destroy an enemy weapon), ‘napoo’ (meaning that there is no more of something, it’s gone, finished - oringally army slang, presently rarely used) and ‘maconochie’ (meaning vegetables stewed with meat in a tin).  

3.       The OED have chosen 100 terms to include in the list within the article to provide a ‘record of social history’ – I feel they have chosen a broad range that covers multiple years and numerous segments under the heading ‘War terms’ – it shows how the war effected everyone, e.g. ‘domestic and civilian life’ and ‘life in the trenches’.
4.   I could use this corpus of terminology to investigate how many terms are used today or how many of the words today’s generation know the definition to, perhaps to understand how effectively social history has been captured through learning about historical events. 

5.     This article could be linked to transcripts written with present modern day speech from various dialects, socialects and idiolects so that a comparison can be made to portray how language has altered over the years but to also identify what has stayed the same, maybe due to high significance or simplistic catchy terminology. 

Discussion of a hero text.
Our group decided to focus upon the Twitter text due to the minimal wording content- this suggests that what's written is of high significance and has been thought about carefully to propose a certain message (however it could be the result to the quick interaction on the popular social networking site).

This blogger has aspects of influential power, an indicator could be the statistical timings of each tweet, the close relationship in time could show how this particular tweeter has a lot of information to share, which in large sums potentially appeals to varied markets (more viewers) - however the target audience is filtered through the use of jargon.
          The term 'retweeted' shows that the given content was vastly influential so was shared to hopefully receive a reflecting, positive impact upon the new audience.

Men and women are of the same species therefore their power should be adequately equivalent but that view was absent when the English language was generated…

Dominance:

When partaking in convocation with mixed-genders and varied statuses, dominance becomes apparent as people try to achieve their convocational aim. It has been said that when convocation takes place between man and women; men are more prone to interrupt.

Dale Spender - 1980-

“Male dominance of lexis leads to female negative space.”  Dale Spender has discovered that as men were the dictionary author’s words often refer to their gender e.g. ‘women’ contains the term ‘men’- stating men’s power upon language.

In connection, the term ‘butch’ refers mainly to women addressing that they have manly assets/habits but the word can be expressed towards men; whereas the word ‘camp’ is purely specified towards men referring that they have feminine conducts  (women are not generally said to be camp). This illustrates how men have terms dedicated to them where as women have to share a term.

Job description- http://www.snagajob.com/job-descriptions/host-and hostess/                                                      

A job description has a sub-heading - ‘What do Hosts and Hostesses do?’  almost referring to the alternated term as a completely different job.  These marked terms stress how male dominance is shown with great clarity. It continues to state both variations of the word throughout the whole piece of text – perhaps this is to avoid offense from one gender if only a single term was used or to redefine that the job is open to males and females (the text’s purpose is to inform and maybe persuade people that this job is most efficient for them).

                 Further down in the text the job implies that the job is perhaps desired for a male ‘work their way into manager jobs.’(manager – male, manageress – female)  – this could however have been done accidently because the term ‘their’ has been used to imply that there are numerous candidates that have equal chance.