This collection spotlights the diachronic dimensions of the linguistic landscape, the importance of exploring temporal dissonances in historical events in order to better understand semiotic, political, and social transformations across different communities over the last century. The volume seeks to expand the current borders of linguistic landscape (LL) research by situating the analysis of signs in the LL within their time–space organization, which has been understudied in existing scholarship. The book, featuring chapters from established and emerging scholars, argues that a focus on the historicity of the city text can reveal unique insights into the role of semiotic processes as precursors and support mechanisms for political and social changes. The collection is structured around different temporal clusters and geographic contexts across the globe where shorter and longer waves of politically driven resemioticization can be most sharply observed – post-colonial communities; post-communist societies; and recent and current sociopolitical upheavals. Taken together, the volume proposes a kaleidoscope view of the complex temporalities that underpin multimodal discourses in contested public spaces, offering new directions for LL research. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, semiotics, visual anthropology, and political science. The Introduction and Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BYNC-ND) 4.0 license.
A historically, spatially and methodologically rich sub-field of sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscapes (LL) is a rapidly evolving area of research and study. With contributions by an international team of experts from the USA, Europe, the UK, South Africa, Israel, Hong Kong and Colombia, this volume is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary account of the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in this area. It covers both the conceptual tools and methodologies used to define and question, and case studies of real-world phenomena to showcase Linguistic Landscapes methods in action. Divided into four parts, chapters bring into dialogue themes relating to reterritorialization practices and the productive nature of boundaries and spaces. This book considers the contemporary challenges facing the field, the politics and processes of identifying and demarcating 'sites of research', and the ethics and pedagogical applications of LL research. With comprehensive lists of further reading, extended discussion questions and suggestions for independent research at the end of each chapter, this is an essential reference work for all LL scholars and students who wish to keep abreast of the current state of the art.
Presenting a detailed examination of the origins, evolutions, and state-of-the-art of linguistic landscape research, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Landscapes is a comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of linguistic landscapes and the study of meaning and interpretation in public spaces and settings. Providing a thorough synopsis of the theories, methodologies, and objects of study which inflect linguistic landscape research across the world, this book is the ideal companion for both new and experienced readers interested in the processes of communication in public spaces across diverse settings and from a broad range of perspectives. Through a wide selection of case studies and original research, the handbook highlights the global reach of linguistic landscape theories and practices. Scrutinising an array of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodological approaches for analysing a wide spectrum of meaning-making phenomena, it investigates semiosis in contexts ranging from graffiti and street signs to tattoos and literature, visible across a variety of sites, including city centres, rural settings, schools, protest marches, museums, war-torn landscapes, and the internet.
This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.
This volume offers comprehensive analyses of how we live continuously in a multiplicity and simultaneity of 'places'. It explores what it means to be in place, the variety of ways in which meanings of place are made and how relationships to others are mediated through the linguistic and material semiotics of place. Drawing on examples of linguistic landscapes (LL) over the world, such as gentrified landscapes in Johannesburg and Brunswick, Mozambican memorializations, volatile train graffiti in Stockholm, Brazilian protest marches, Guadeloupian Creole signs, microscapes of souvenirs in Guinea-Bissau and old landscapes of apartheid in South Africa in contemporary time, this book explores how we are what we are through how we are emplaced. Across these examples, world-leading contributors explore how LLs contribute to the (re)imagining of different selves in the living past (living the past in the present), alternative presents and imagined futures. It focuses particularly on how the LL in all of these mediations is read through emotionality and affect, creating senses of belonging, precarity and hope across a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds. The volume offers a reframing of linguistics landscape research in a geohumanities framework emphasizing negotiations of self in place in LL studies, building upon a rich body of LL research. With over 40 illustrations, it covers various methodological and epistemological issues, such as the need for extended temporal engagement with landscapes, a mobile approach to landscapes and how bodies engage with texts.
Visible language is widespread and familiar in everyday life. We find it in shop signs, advertising billboards, street and place name signs, commercial logos and slogans, and visual arts. The field of linguistic landscapes draws on insights from sociolinguistics, language policy and semiotics to show how these public forms of language relate to multiple issues in language policy, language rights, language and education, language and culture, and globalization. Stretching from the earliest stone inscriptions, to posters and street signs, and to today's electronic media, linguistic landscapes sit at the crossroads of language, society, geography, and visual communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book-length synthesis of this exciting, rapidly-developing field. Using photographic evidence from across three continents, it demonstrates the methodology and approaches used, and summarises its findings and developments so far. It also seeks to answer common questions from its critics, and to suggest new directions for further study.
Space and time, their infiniteness and/or their limit(ation)s, their coding, conceptualization and the relationship between the two, have been intriguing people for millennia. Linguistics and literature are no exceptions in this sense. This book brings together eight essays which all deal with the expression of space and/or time in language and/or literature. The book explores the issues of space, time and their interrelation from two different perspectives: the linguistic and the literary. The first section—Time and Space in Language—contains four papers which focus on linguistics, i.e. explore issues relative to the expression of time and space in natural languages. The topics under consideration include: typology regarding the expression of spatial information in languages around the world (Ch.1), space as expressed and conceptualized in neutral, postural and verbs of fictive motion (Ch. 2), prepositional semantics (Ch.3), aspectuality (in Tamil, Ch. 4). All articles propose innovative topics and/or approaches, crossreferring when possible between space and time. Given that all seem to propose at least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”, the strong cognitivist nature of the approach (even when the paper is not written within a cognitive linguistic framework) represents a particularly strong feature of the section, with a strong appeal to experts from fields that need not necessarily be linguistic. The second section of this volume—Space and Time in Literature—brings together four essays dealing with literary topics. Inherent in each narrative are both temporal and spatial implications because a literary text testifies of a certain time, it is from and about a certain period, as well as about a certain space, even if virtual. A particularly strong feature of these papers is that they envision space and time as complementary parameters of experience and not as conceptual opposites, following the transfer of perspective through the whole century. Departing from the late nineteenth century England’s and Croatia’s fictive spaces (Ch. 5), the topic moves via the American Southern Gothic, focusing on Faulkner from the thirties to the early sixties (Ch. 6), via the post-WWII perspectives on history, probing the postmodern context of temporality (Ch 7), to finally reach the contemporary era of post 9/11 space-time (Ch 8). The voyage from chapter five to eight is thus a journey through space and time that allows for some answers to the nature of reality (of a variety of space-times) as conceived by both the authors of these essays as well as by the authors that these essays discuss. The main goal of the editors has been to bring together different scientific traditions which can contribute complementary concerns and methodologies to the issues under exam; from the literary and descriptive via the diachronic and typological explorations all the way to cognitive (linguistic) analyses, bordering psycholinguistics and neuroscience. One of the strengths of this volume thus lies in the diversity of perspectives articulated within it, where the agreements, but also the controversies and divergences demonstrate constant changes in society which, in turn, shapes our views of space-time/reality. All this also suggests that science and literature are not above or apart from their culture, but embedded within it, and that there exists a strong relativistic interrelation between (spatio-temporal) reality and culture. The only hope to objectively envisage any if not all of the above, is by learning how to move (our thought) through space, time or, to put it in simpler terms, how to shift perspectives.
This monograph investigates the development of human spatial knowledge by analyzing its elementary structures and studying how it is further shaped by various societal conditions. By taking a thoroughly historical perspective on knowledge and integrating results from various disciplines, this work throws new light on long-standing problems in epistemology such as the relation between experience and preformed structures of cognition. What do the orientation of apes and the theory of relativity have to do with each other? Readers will learn how different forms of spatial thinking are related in a long-term history of knowledge. Scientific concepts of space such as Newton’s absolute space or Einstein’s curved spacetime are shown to be rooted in pre-scientific structures of knowledge, while at the same time enabling the integration of an ever expanding corpus of experiential knowledge. This work addresses all readers interested in questions of epistemology, in particular philosophers and historians of science. It integrates forms of spatial knowledge from disciplines including anthropology, developmental psychology and cognitive sciences, amongst others.
Annie Dillard, a practitioner of the literary epiphany, has become a representative of a neoromantic movement that combines the ecological interest of wilderness literature with the aesthetics of a highly stylized literature. This study of the Pulitzer prize-winning essayist considers her as wilderness philosopher, critic, and arch-romantic.
This series of readings, explores the functioning of moments in poems when the medium--language--becomes an issue. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
