Innovative study analyses the language of 1930s shipbuilding

Yesterday an English Language postgraduate presented her initial findings from using our shipbuilding archives. Puteri Zarina Megat Khalid’s portgraduate research seminar was entitled “Modality Analysis of the Promotional Genre (in the shipbuilding domain)”. On study leave from her post lecturing at the University of Kuala Lumpur’s Malaysian Institute of Marine Engineering Technology, Ms Khalid is now in the third year of her PhD under the supervison of Catherine Emmott and Wendy Anderson.

Queen Elizabeth Brochure, UCS1/115/9

This presentation focussed on a brochure produced for the launch of the liner Queen Elizabeth in 1938 (ref UCS 1/115/9). Having analysed the 278 sentences in the text, she was able to challenge claims made by many linguists that promotional copywriters do not make their presence felt with “modality markers”. In layman’s terms this means she is proposing that the author, Captain Taprell Dorling, carefully chose his verbs to convey his own strength of belief in the copy he was producing. She acknowledged that while today’s copywriters may be able to convey complete detachment, this has apparently not always been the case. She is yet to discover if this is an isolated example, or perhaps a style commonly used in the 1930s or in the shipbuilding industry.

We are grateful to Ms Khalid for sharing her findings with us and we hope she will be among many English Language scholars to use the Scottish Business Archive in this way.