Linguistic Landscape - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2017

As semiotic spaces, monuments convey messages through multiple information design modes, including language, materiality and emplacement. As research on semiotic landscape has pointed out (e.g., Shohamy and Waksman 2009 , Abousnnouga and Machin 2010 , Train 2016 ), these messages are often contested in nature and convey competing discourses inherent in the spaces they occupy. This paper explores those competing discourses manifested in a monument dedicated to the 1976 student protest and violent suppression of it by the Thai military and right-wing paramilitary groups. Working within a production of space framework ( Lefebvre 1991 ) and drawing on insights from the grammar of visual design ( Kress and van Leeuwen 2006 ) and nexus analysis ( Scollon and Scollon 2004 ), the paper attempts to show how these contested discourses are reflected in the monument’s historiography as conceived, in its physical appearance and emplacement, and as it is experienced today. The analysis is based on photographic data of the monument and its immediate physical context, published accounts of the events of October 6, and interviews with survivors, commemoration planners, and the monument’s designer.

While the printed t-shirt remains a prominent form of communication in our contemporary linguistic landscape, little research to date has examined the semiotics of this unique mode of communication. In response to the interdisciplinary ‘invitation’ from Shohamy and Ben-Rafael (2015) , this paper draws on principles and methods from social semiotics ( van Leeuwen, 2005 ) and Systemic Functional Linguistics ( Halliday, 1989 ) to explore the meaning-making potential of English words on printed t-shirts. The paper begins by applying Halliday’s concept of mode to the printed t-shirt and then presents a linguistically motivated taxonomy of words on printed t-shirts. In addition to foregrounding the printed t-shirt as a site for future exploration, this paper aims to present a close textual discourse analysis – an examination of the ‘perceived space’ ( Malinowski, 2015 ) – to complement, inform and engage with current trends and methods in linguistic landscape research and pedagogy.

Most linguistic landscape research to date has focused on how people read and write language in the material world. Much less attention has been paid to the way linguistic landscapes sometimes read and write their inhabitants through technologies like CCTV cameras, intruder alarms, and other aspects of the built environment designed to make people ‘visible’ – what I call surveillant landscapes. This article puts forth a framework for analyzing the surveillant nature of linguistic landscapes based on tools from mediated discourse analysis. It sees surveillant landscapes in terms of the way they communicate practices of surveillance to the people who inhabit them (‘discourses in place’), the kinds of social relationships and social identities that they make possible (‘interaction orders’), and the ways architectures of surveillance come to be internalized by citizens, while at the same time aspects of their behaviors and identities come to be sedimented into their environments (‘historical bodies’). I argue that studies of linguistic landscapes should take more account of the agenitive nature of linguistic landscapes and their increasing ability to recognize and to entextualize what takes place within them, and the consequences of this both on situated social interactions and on broader political and economic realities.

Research in the linguistic landscape (LL) field underscores the need for investigating the passers-by’s perspectives. To explore how the passers-by perceive LLs, researchers often use questionnaires or interviews. This article suggests the use of an innovative research tool named PhotoVoice ( Wang, Burris & Xiang, 1996 ), to shed light on the perception of signs by Israeli-Arab college students in their ideologically-laden area. After familiarizing the students with PhotoVoice and guiding questions for examining LLs, they were asked to capture photos of signs within their localities, analyze the messages embedded within, and write commentaries voicing their reflections. Thus, students themselves became both the data collectors and the analyzers. One of the highlighted categories was the absence of Arabic from commercial signs produced by Arab business owners. Students’ “PhotoVoices” within this category reflected not only the linguistic reality of the commercial signs within Arab localities, but also the ways such space was experienced by them as local inhabitants. Such findings demonstrate how, through PhotoVoice, LLs can become a stimulus for profound cognitive and emotional reflections of passers-by toward the LL.