Investigating language - Car

advertsAlex and Tilly

Modern adverts are more simplistic Image of car is likely to take up the whole

page, not a small section Basic backgrounds – more emphasis on car Websites used on modern day adverts More colourful backgrounds on newer adverts Weight references wouldn’t be acceptable

Hypotheses - differences

(Example)

Use of synthetic personalisation Larger images of the car Repetition of the car’s name/brand Company slogans Technical information about the car- ‘front-wheel suspension’

Hypotheses - similarities

(Example)

Resources = general newspapers and magazines Some magazines, such as FHM, didn’t provide any car

adverts at all, so we were unable to use anything from these.

Our modern advert is a valid comparative with our older advert as they are both car adverts containing important information about the car. However, our modern day advert is much more simplistic than our older advert.

Easy to find the car adverts as we had the available resources which allowed us to search through and pick out the appropriate texts. It was also fairly easy to analyse the texts and find similarities and differences between them.

Difficult to analyse the texts if they had a lack of words.

Methodology

1962 - 2011

More colour on newer adverts Bigger image of just the car – no separate little

images Photoshop used to edit the car Ford advert states the different engine sizes of

the model in a lot more depth and all of the features that people look for in a car. The Austin A40 only describes what the car looks like and how big it is

‘Austin A40’ name stands out in the middle of the page, the ford advert doesn’t

Systematic Analysis – Graphology

Graphology has changed over time due a number of different reasons; The growth of technology and its software-

Photoshop is used on almost every advert Improved cameras/quality How magazines and newspapers are printed- 50

years ago they would have been printed manually with ink, today they are printed in large factories by fast machines

Why has the graphology of adverts changed over time?

Systematic analysis – Lexis

We thought the word ‘roomy’ would be used much more nowadays than the word ‘capacious’ which is used in the Austin A40 advert. However, using the Ngram Viewer, we were able to see that this is not the case as both of these words are used equally in 2000.

The grammar of the two adverts hasn’t changed dramatically since it’s within a time frame of about 50 years, and words haven’t changed a lot at all over this period

However, a couple of grammatical differences we noticed on the adverts were; The start of the sentence not starting with a capital

letter ‘you invest in a Austin’ Short sentences containing just a few words on the

modern Ford advert, but more complex and compound sentences on the Austin A40 advert

Systematic analysis – Grammar

Semantics are in both the old and modern adverts as the image of the car that the advert is about, is shown as the centre focus

Semantics

To conclude, adverts have changed a lot over time mostly due to the growth in technology. The language used in the older advert (Austin A40) isn't that different to the modern advert (Ford focus), which is surprising.

In our hypotheses we suggested that modern adverts have minimal writing on compared to older adverts. However, our hypotheses were proven wrong as the advert we analysed had a lot more words than we believed modern adverts would have.

The Ford advert contained 94 words and the older advert contained 270 words. Although there are significantly less words on the modern advert, there’s still a lot more than we previously expected and therefore, not as simplistic as we first thought.

Conclusion

Our advice to someone who is wishing to explore our chosen investigation would be to not spend much time choosing their adverts and to pick ones with plenty of writing on to write about as we had to keep changing ours in order to have enough information to write about and analyse.

Evaluation

What went well What we could improve on

Use of resources – we had a wide range of resources which were available for us of both modern and older adverts. We used magazines and the internet to find suitable car adverts that we could use and analyse

Time management – we didn’t allow ourselves enough time to write our systematic analysis in a lot of detail as we spent too much time choosing the adverts that we were going to use