Linguistic Landscape - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2020

Abstract

The paper starts with signs that Cooper and I found in the Old City of Jerusalem. It describes how the term Linguistic Landscape was applied to the recollections of francophone high school students of the signs they had seen. It traces the many collections of photos employing digital cameras and cell-phones, and research that was derived from these collections, including published papers and books, a journal, and an annual workshop. The paper regrets the rarity of details of authorship (but reports who was responsible for the Jerusalem street signs), and the tendency to interpret signs without detailing authorship. Signs provide evidence of the state of literacy, but ignore the sociolinguistic make-up of the local community, missing that for earlier scholars “linguistic landscape” meant speech as well as writing. It regrets the paucity of efforts to provide a theory of public signage, arguing that this could be derived from the field of Semiotics.

Abstract

Taking the dispute between East Timor and Australia over their maritime boundary as an illustrative context, this article discusses the role of semiotic resources in constructing chronotopes of protest. Reflecting first on language choice in urban protests during East Timor’s struggle for independence, the paper goes on to analyse the deployment of material and virtual resources in East Timorese-led demonstrations against the Australian government’s stance in the dispute. Using ‘entanglement’ as a structuring metaphor, and looking at language choice, social and grammatical indexicality, imagery, embodied cultural capital, and the choreography of assembly, the paper explores how protesters constructed a set of chronotopes that drew on the injuries of the colonial past, and re-emplaced and re-framed them in the post-colonial present. The paper looks at the linguistic landscape of protest as a semiotic aggregate in which the periphery claims a voice and ‘talks back’ to the centre.

Abstract

This article addresses the unresolved issue of systematic survey area selection for large-scale quantitative Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies. It presents a strategy of ‘hypothesis-driven stratified sampling’ whereby survey areas are picked out in a nested, multi-step process on the basis of the configuration of local LL audiences (regarding age, multilingualism, and tourism) and ambient activity types (commercial vs. residential). The rationale for this strategy is drawn from variationist sociolinguistics; and the undertaking is accordingly cast as ‘Variationist Linguistic Landscape Study (VaLLS)’. The details of the design are showcased and implications discussed in the context of the large-scale project ‘ELLViA – English in the Linguistic Landscape of Vienna, Austria’. More generally, it is shown how the application of state-of-the-art variationist principles and methodology to quantitative LL research significantly enhances the latter’s scientific rigor, which has been a major point of criticism.

Abstract

While the role of time and emotion have been acknowledged in linguistic and semiotic landscapes research, the particular qualities of tempo and affect have rarely been discussed directly. This case study from an Italian-American festival in South Philadelphia, a diverse and changing urban neighborhood, demonstrates how the two qualities work together to influence the discursive construction of identity for residents as they interact with the space. Ethnographic observation and photographs from the two days of the festival, as well as interviews with locals, frame the discussion of how to explore the landscape through this lens. The paper encourages researchers to devote more attention to the abstract qualities of landscapes, and serves as a starting point for critical examinations of a place and the distribution of capital among its occupants.

This article reviews Multiple Globalizations: Linguistic Landscapes in World-Cities978 90 04 36083 9978 90 04 38513 9