Discourse and the Linguistic Landscape

Abstract

Research into the way that linguistic and other semiotic signs are displayed in public space has opened up a productive field for social language analysis. Often focused on the policy implications of public signage, at both institutional and grassroots levels, linguistic landscape research has, from the very beginning, engaged with issues of politics, ideology and cultural representation and thus, indirectly, discourse. In recent years, it has also begun to theorize the material experience of landscapes and the ways in which semiotic artifacts and practices generate meaning by interacting in explicitly dialogical ways. To date, however, theorizing that is directed specifically at the relationship between linguistic landscape studies and discourse studies has been slight. This chapter explores the nature of this relationship by focusing on select case studies that exemplify the ways in which acts of linguistic and semiotic display in the public arena operate as key sites for political regulation and contestation and as sites of affect. These short case studies also examine how meaning is generated through the complex layering of contexts, the interplay between multiple signs, the narrative and affective potential of landscapes and the dialogic possibilities presented by social media. This discourse-based approach to linguistic landscapes allows insights into how local meanings get upscaled and reconfigured, pulling site-specific semiotic events into much broader discourses and materialities.

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