Second assignment

In this paper I am going to take a close look at these two old posters that deal
with safety.

The first poster is divided in two cartoons; the first one has a single question,
which is answered in the second cartoon. The clauses that are used in this
poster are composed by a subject and a predicate. However the last sentence
“Report them to your supervisor” is a final command, which summarizes the
posters intention.
These sentences have a logical meaning because the meaning of the phrase is
determined by a logical inference. Answering “All accidents are important”,
the meaning of the poster is reinforced and this sentence works as a
subordinate question. They also have a positivist meaning because the
dialogue means what it says. It can be empirically confirmed, because as
everybody knows every accident has negative effects.
Pictures are always important in a context, in this case to understand the
meaning of the sentence especially. Taking this into account, we might realize
that this poster could have been hanged in a factory, an office or wherever a
group of people work together and fire can be caused. Consequently, we can
know that with the question, they are asked to pay attention to their behavior
in the workplace and respect their workmates safety.

In the second poster, we can read two commands connected by the

conjunction “but” that gives us a sense of advice. The sentences are pretty
clear and also similar; they both have a verb and direct object.
This advert literally means that we should heat up the child but at the same
time have an eye on the fire, because it is very dangerous. But, how can we
heat the child? Have we to put the child inside an oven? The first sentence is
an expression that has an ambiguous meaning, in our society “warm the child”
means to keep him or her in a comfortable and warm place. However, “warm
somebody” also means to fill someone with affection, having a figurative
meaning. So, context is quite important in order to understand fully this
poster. Due to the picture we can know that this poster was hanged in some
Western city, because of the clothes which children are wearing and the toys
that are drawn next to the chimney. Without the picture and other contextual
information, we could have thought that the child was food that should be
warmed. As a consequence of the picture, we also can know the approximate
date of publication of this poster which may be in the late 1940’s or early
1950’s; we can tell this by the kind of drawing and by the way the children are
represented.

These two posters could have been the previous step of the fire alarm system’s
installation because they both try to warn us about the risks of fire. The first
one is especially about how we should react if we see that there is a risk,
greater or minor, of a fire. The second poster draws attention to the harmful
effects of a not supervised fire in a home, where a family with little children
lives.