On the Linguistic Aspects of Street Signs in the U.K. : In Comparison to Advertisement English

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English expressions used for street and indoor signs and notices can be summarized as follows. 1) While advertising English often uses series of adjectival expressions in front of nouns,” street signs do not use such patterns as often (e.g., Pay by phone parking). 2) Similar to advertisements, street signs frequently (but not mandatorily) lack function words, such as the definite article, “the” and pronoun, “your” for brevitys sake. 3) Both “major sentences” and “minor sentences” are used for English signs and advertising English. Major sentences may sound more polite or less commanding than minor sentences. They are often more suitable for recommendations or requests. Minor sentences, on the other hand, are excellent for brevity and economy of words, providing only the main points of the messages. 4) Four types of sentence functions (i.e., declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamatives) are observed in signs as well as in advertisements. Interrogatives do not usually appear alone, but are immediately followed by “solutions,” indicating what users are supposed to do or can expect in particular situations. Imperatives are commonly used to give orders or warnings but are also pragmatically used for requests. 5) Unlike in advertising English, rhetorical techniques, such as rhyme, assonance, alliteration, puns and deviant spelling are not often used for street signs and notices. 6) In signs and notices, formal vocabulary items, such as “proceed,” “offender” and “vacate” are preferred. 7) The passive voice is frequently used for signs in contexts where it is irrelevant to state who actually carries out an action, as in the example, “Unauthorised vehicles will be clamped.” 8) For signs and notices there are no rigid rules for punctuation (e.g., full stops, exclamation marks) or the use of upper or lower case letters. 9) Street signs and notices often carry words, such as “caution,” “notice,” “danger” and “warning” in isolation as the first word of texts. 10) Many street and railway signs start with “Do not” or “No” to discourage undesired behavior in particular situations.

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  • 経済志林

    経済志林 79 (4), 247-261, 2012-03-20

    法政大学経済学部学会

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