Linguistic landscape and the local : a comparative study of texts, visible in the streets of two culturally diverse urban neighbourhoods in Marseille and Pretoria.

[摘要] The thesis concerns the linguistic landscape (LL) of two neighbourhoods, one in Pretoria,South Africa, and the other in Marseille, France. This is a longitudinal study whose data wascollected over two years of site visits. LL are explored in terms of both space and place. Interms of place, they are seen to be constitutive of a sense of place, allowing insights intomemory, aspiration, and familial and cultural networks. Spatially, they are seen to realise apolitics where design and distribution of LL are markers of power and modality. Analysistakes its point of departure in geosemiotics. Artefacts of LL are interpreted as sites ofencounter of four cycles of discourse: the interaction order, habitus, semiotics of place andvisual semiotics. The focus is on understanding LL artefacts, their production and reception,as a nexus of practice. Methodologically, walking - as a creative practice, and as anactualisation of the place and space of the neighbourhood - is chosen for photographing LL,for observing interactions and for meeting participants to the research. In examininghabitus, the discourses, literacy and narratives of the people who live, work and passthrough the site are compared. Deep social and economic similarities are noted betweenthe two sites. Exploration of the semiotics of place brings to light regularities in the featuresof formal and informal LL, the nature of participation with and subversion of these texts, butalso disparities among producers and receivers in terms of literacy, access, the socio-culturaland the socio-economic. Visual semiotic analysis continues these findings and it is notedthat global and local discourses of identification, aspiration and self-stylisation circulatetransversally in the sites. LL are taken to realise a politics of space when multimodal analysisof composition and modality is extended to the streetscape, as LL ensemble. A key facet ofthe research is the interpretation of informal LL. Their inclusion challenges existing LLmethodologies by flagging the necessity to ground quantitative findings ethnographically.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand