Compare and contrast how the speaker of Text A and the speakers of Text B express their ideas about Parisian art galleries and works of art

Both texts concern the subject matter of Parisian art and Parisian art galleries, Text A more generally and Text B more specifically because as the title indicates, it focuses solely on the art in the Louvre art museum. Text A is a spontaneous spoken monologue by a young woman Zara and is part of a set of personal narratives from Zara and her mother Ann about their experiences in their time spent in Paris. On the other hand Text B is an extract from a tour guide by Rick Steves, taken from his official website which offers various free guides and downloads. In this text Steves,  along with his assistant Kate, guides the audience through the Louvre, providing educational information along the way whereas Zara is merely conveying her opinions and experiences to her audience therefore a difference is highlighted in terms of the entirely subjective style of Text A and the widely objective style of Text B.
Furthermore the texts differ in terms of their respective modes. In terms of the mode continuum, Text A is in the spontaneous spoken mode whereas Text B is a multi-modal text produced as a planned spoken text and received via the electronic mode. Features which denote this are its accessibility via the Rick Steves official website as well as accompanying audio ans sound features which are cohesive with the speech. In terms of the contexts of production of the texts, Text A has likely been produced exophorically as Zara is most likely not in Paris as she is speaking; Text B is likely to have been produced exophorically too, though both Steves and his assistant Kate most likely visited the Louvre in order to do their due-dilligence and gather comprehensive information for their tour to ensure that it is both informative and correctly instructive. This endophoric research most likely formed the basis of Text B however it is probable that Steves did more research involving the individual pieces of art depicted in the text and several drafts whilst not actually at the Louvre along with several edits involving the various mixed mode features to ensure that it is received by the audience in the intended way. As Text A is spontaneous speech, it is synchronous because it has been created in real time, as reflected by the plethora of hesitancy features such as the frequent use of the filler ‘erm’ and false starts and self-repairs. In comparison to this, Text B is also synchronous as Steves creates it in real time though as it is pre-planned speech, the audience receives the text outside of the time at which it was produced. 
In terms of the contexts of reception of the texts, both texts have listening audiences. Text A has an internal, extremely narrow audience, most likely an interviewer in immediate context who asks Zara a question about her experiences and opinions on Parisian culture/art. This is perhaps shown through Zara’s frequent hesitancy features such as the false start and self-repair ‘I went when it was (.) I was doing’ and her hedges, both features of a spontaneous spoken monologue. For example the hedges ‘kind of’ and ‘I don’t know’ is often used by Zara when she is uttering particularly opinionated exclamatives in an effort to maintain politeness and protect face she softens some of her more derogatory views about Parisian art. It may be said that Zara is possibly aware of a wider double audience further down the line of reception, for example for this anthology. Contrastingly Text B has a relatively narrow audience (though much wider than the immediate audience of Text A) whereby the audience are people who are visiting the Louvre museum. The audience is also likely to be American as Rick Steves is well known for his guidebooks and podcasts concerning travelling in Europe there. The tour guide is something for the listener to participate in actively and use rather than just simply listen to (like in Text A) whilst they are actually walking around the Louvre, as an informative, entertaining guide. The audience will be listening to the text via an electronic medium (with headphones), likely a phone or as it says in the text ‘an MP3 player’ in the form of a downloaded version of the tour accessed from Steves’ online website. 
Following on from this, the likely audiences and contexts of production and reception of both texts help to point out affordances and constraints of the respective genres. Because Text B is a multi-modal text it means that it can be easily accessed by the audience although a constraint would be that one must possess the electronic medium i.e. a phone to do so. Overall as it is assumed that the vast majority will possess some form of modern technology from which they can access the text, therefore this idea of multi-modal reception is an affordance of Text B. Furthermore its accessibility via modern technology also means that the audience can interact actively with the text, participating in their tour guide through the affordances of being able to pause and replay the guide in order to tailor the guide to exactly the pace they want. Another affordance is the carefully planned pauses and the steady tempo of the speech as this not only allows the audience to digest the information more easily but also allows them to pause and re-navigate more easily without trying too hard or missing vital information. Furthermore both speakers of Text B use the phonological feature, emphatic stress, to foreground specific clauses or individual lexis which are crucial for the reader. In Kate’s utterances this is often done for example with the purpose of emphasising spatial deixis and directing the audience where they need to go such as the emphatic stress on the ordinal determiner ‘first’ in the noun phrase ‘first left’. 
In contrast to this, the genre of Text A has more constraints than affordances. The affordances of Text A include that it is received in immediate context and the immediate audience receives the most authentic response from Zara. The genre allows Zara to express themselves authentically without having the affordance of time like in Text B, to carefully plan one’s speech. However, due to its spontaneous nature, the non-fluency and mistakes throughout the text can make it difficult to fully understand Zara’s intended meaning behind some of her utterances. Furthermore hedges like ‘I don’t know’ and frequent use of the weasel word ‘like’ are a constraint of Text A for a similar reason; these features akin to this genre and mode can distort the intended meaning behind Zara’s utterances, leading to confusion on what her opinions are on Parisian art and thus do not fulfil the primary purpose of the text. The narrow immediate audience of Text A is also a constraint as well as the fact that it cannot be permanently recorded whereas Text B has a much wider and very specific audience who can easily access this text whenever they need it.
It is also clear that the texts differ in terms of their purposes, due to their genres and audiences. The primary purpose of Text A is for Zara to express her opinions on Parisian art with the secondary purpose being to recount experiences. There is a relationship however between these two purposes as Zara conveys her opinions to the audience often directly or indirectly through her experiences of her time in Paris when she was younger. Due to the primary purpose of the text, it is mainly spoken in the present tense however the secondary purpose is also fulfilled by the use of the past tense when Zara is recounting her experiences such as the periodic clause ‘when I was doing work experience’. Furthermore, in order to be informative about the subject matter of Parisian art, Zara employs the use of several subject specific proper nouns belonging to the semantic field of Parisian art and artworks such as ‘Manet’, ‘the Mona Lisa’ and ‘Musee d’Orsay’. In comparison to this Text B is a multi-purpose text with the respective purposes being fulfilled by the two speakers- Rick and Kate. With the genre being a tour guide, the primary purpose of the text is to guide and instruct the audience around the Louvre. This purpose is primarily carried out through Kate’s utterances with her frequent use of imperatives such as ‘climb a set of stairs’ which directly instruct the audience where to go. Use of elaborate prepositional noun phrases such as ‘on the north side’ and ‘to a long-brick ceilinged wall’ creates spatial deixis, providing visual imagery of exactly where the audience needs to go as well as use of temporal determiners such as ‘first’ in the noun phrase ‘first left’. The text also serves to educate the audience about the works of art in the Louvre, a purpose carried out predominantly in Steves’ utterances. Adverbial time phrases such as ‘from about 3000 BC’ and the simile ‘as old as writing itself’ fulfil this purpose to educate as they provide the audience with specific historical context about the Louvre’s works of art. However as an example of the services offered by the Rick Steve’s brand, this text also has the underlying purpose to promote future use of Rick Steve’s tour guides and to entertain the audience. The affordances of this Text work to fulfil this self-promotional purpose, as well as Steve’s favourable presentation of the Louvre as a worthy visit, and his use of humour and idiom in creating a friendly and relatable persona. 
In Text A, Zara begins by presenting Parisian art in a favourable light using the abstract noun phrase ‘an historical reputation for great art’ in order to present Parisian art culture as one which is held historically in high regard. Furthermore this favourable view is foregrounded through the repetition of the attributive adjective ‘great’ and the synonym ‘amazing’ to describe the amount of art that is available in Parisian art galleries such as the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay. In addition to this, there is this continual presentation of Paris as being a beacon for contemporary and historical art for example the state verb phrase ‘how much I loved them’ followed by the periodic clause ‘when seeing their art in Paris’ indicates that, for Zara, Paris is the placed that honed her interest in art, thus presenting it as a place where a passion for art is really sparked, due to the huge array of famous art on offer there. Indeed she does divulge that it is ‘so much more exciting’ to see admirable pieces of art in person in the Parisian art galleries.
However unlike in Text B, Zara presents the commercialisation and popularity of Parisian art in an unfavourable light in Text A. The hyperbole in the concrete noun phrase ‘a million people’ exemplifies Zara’s voice here as one of contempt for the sheer amount of people who visit Parisian art galleries furthermore the contrast between the dismissive concrete noun phrase ‘some big famous painting’ and the concrete noun phrase ‘some amazing paintings in the Louvre’ in the previous utterance foregrounds this idea that the ‘crowds’ that surround the works of art in Parisian art galleries are a hindrance and have a derogatory effect on how Zara views the works of art themselves- it detracts from their artistic beauty and makes the trip not worth it.
On the other hand, Steves, in Text B presents the fame of the Louvre and its works of art and popularity in a more favourable light, as one of the selling points of the Louvre to partially fulfil the underlying purpose of the text, for example the metaphorical figurative language of the prepositional noun phrase ‘above a sea of worshipping tourists’. In addition to this, the presentation of famous art works such as ‘the Venus de Milo’ and the attributive adjective ‘star-studded’ modifying the proper noun ‘Denon wing’ implies that the fame and prestige of the Louvre is something which is intended to attract and entice the audience to enjoy the Louvre rather than presenting it as a deterrent or hindrance like in Text A.
Furthermore, Zara, like Steves in Text B, presents the variety of art in Paris. She first describes the ‘classic’ forms of art in Paris but also utters the noun phrase ‘very modern art galleries’ like the Pompidou which juxtaposes the old with the new in terms of what Parisian art has to offer. This foregrounds the idea that Parisian art is diverse and can be brought into the modern day for modern contemporaries as well as being appealing to those who are interested in historical, classical forms of art.
Steves also presents the classical forms of art in Text B though in a lot more depth than the speaker of Text A. Steve’s brings the statues to life through the use of the present tense verb ‘wander’ which personifies the ‘pre classical Greek statues’ and the proper noun phrase ‘Greek Barbie Dolls’. This is also done to make the unfamiliar pieces of art, familiar by providing the listener with something to which they can relate.