Could look at how a given company alters its use of language over different mediums e.g. via social networking sites, to its official website, to posters, to TV adverts and how the language changes between healthy and unhealthy advertisements.

For example:

Healthy brand - Change for Life:
                           * Posters
                           * TV advert
                           * Official website

Unhealthy brand - McDonald's:
                           * Posters
                           * TV adverts
                           * Official website

Could look at how adverts gain interest of the audience, e.g. via characters

Could look at how UNHEALTHY food is portrayed in adverts persuading you to buy the product versus adverts trying to convince you to not eat unhealthy (food warnings).

Food warnings...


Promotion of healthy foods...



Unhealthy adverts generally avoid any real detail about the product specifically - it focuses upon PUNS and slogans to turn attention away from the underlining fact that it is bad for you.


Unhealthy trying to portray a healthy image...



Unhealthy products have started to try and cater for the healthy, get fit social trend at present - to not loose customers but to gain new ones.

For instance - Coca Cola sponsored the Olympics

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