Linguistic Landscape - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the linguistic contents of political protest signs that were erected at sit-in sites in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, during the summer of 2011. Sign authors employed a wide variety of linguistic codes and symbolic visual resources to subvert state authority, urge fellow citizens to action, and advocate a number of other political goals. Drawing on the methodology of Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies, the current effort investigates the relationship between linguistic code and factors such as sign location, medium, length, and thematic content. Multinomial logistic regression analysis reveals a significant relationship between sign code and medium, for example, as handwritten signs show more linguistic diversity than printed signs. Qualitative analysis focuses on sign authors, use of the symbolic and semiotic resources associated with these codes. This study of the ephemeral, transitory LL of Egyptian sit-in sites demonstrates the many and varied ways in which citizen sign authors manipulate concepts of formality, code choice, and imagery to encourage audiences to take up their messages as resources for social action in their own worlds.

Abstract

This article examines how eliciting metaphors from multimodal commercials can facilitate a critical interpretation of advertising media, which is ubiquitous in the LL and highly manipulative. Adolescent students, a population which is particularly vulnerable to advertising’s influence, utilized the analytic tool of metaphor elicitation to abstract away from the vast multimodal information that characterizes commercials, and simplify this information in the linguistic formulation of metaphor (e.g., super-pharm is a circus). The contrived link between the given brand (e.g., Super-Pharm pharmaceutical stores) and its metaphorically-attached source domain (e.g., circus) was emphasized to increase awareness of how the commercial was structured to deceive consumers. The study evaluated the intervention using a quasi-experimental design, showing that metaphor elicitation facilitated the knowledge, critical attitudes, and responsible behavioral inclinations of participants concerning advertising media. The study suggests that using the linguistic formulation of metaphor can help adolescents critically interpret the increasingly-deceptive commercial landscape.

Abstract

This paper opens up a perspective for viewing the effect of globalization on ethnic restaurants in a college town, Bloomington, at Indiana, in the US. While existing scholarship on shop signs were focused on interpreting signages that are mostly visible from the exterior (e.g. Collins & Slembrouck, 2007; Malinowski, 2009; Ong, Ghesquière, & Serwe, 2013), this study examines publicly displayed material artefacts, and the dialogical relationship between customers and waiters, taking into account one aspect of Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) perceptual space which is highly visible in a restaurant: tastes. Through interviews, participant observations and geosemiotic analysis of signs inside and on the exterior of restaurants, I evinced a configuration of semiotic aggregates (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) drawing from my ethnographic work on ethnic foodscapes. Findings from the study suggest that multiple social actors contributed to shaping cosmopolitanism in a college town.

Abstract

This article examines the use of Moroccan Arabic (MA) in the new Linguistic Landscape (LL) in Morocco, and in particular in the city of Meknés, in a new neighbourhood known as (حمرية) Hamriya or La Ville Nouvelle. In particular, the ways in which current socio-economic transformations produce new spaces of communications are explored, highlighting the extent to which MA is used in urban public spaces as new linguistic practices. In turn, the increasing visibility of MA in the LL and its subsequent nourishing of hybrid practices are discussed. The data points to a re-semiotisation of space in a Moroccan linguistic regime historically characterized by a well-established linguistic hierarchy. Ultimately, the use of MA creates new language practices and policies that resist and transform the sociolinguistic regime which is analysed here by a close examination of linguistic variation in Arabic in the public space.

This article reviews Language in the Public Space: An Introduction to the Linguistic Landscape978-1-9829-2542-0€18.00

This article reviews The Tyranny of Writing: Ideologies of the Written Word97814742924679781474292443£85.50