符号的地理面向——重构实体世界中话语的意义系统

The Geography of Signage: Remaking the Meaning System of Discourse in Place

进入21世纪,话语分析从文本研究、多模态研究、超模态研究发展到中介话语研究。关于话语的地理面向研究和地理文本及其情境的互动研究已成为语言景观(LL)的主要研究内容,但是该流派更关注文本与地域的互动关系,对地理语言的系统研究较少。聚焦于实体世界中的语言符号系统,通过梳理符号哲学和社会符号学的理论脉络,阐释地理符号学的学科进化,为研究公共语言和符号话语提供了一个分析性框架。通过一个交通标志的历史变迁,来初步验证该框架的可操作性。该案例揭示了话语的地理建构对其整个意义系统生成的重要作用。

The analysis of discourses has currently shifted from text, multimodality, hypermodality to social action as mediational means. Meanwhile, the research on discursive geographic orientation and the interaction between texts and their material world has become the major concern of linguistic landscape, which shows little interest in large, macroscopic semiotic systems in the concrete geography. This paper throws a geosemiotics light on languages/signs in place by scrutinizing the philosophy, outlining its evolutionary path to provide a tentative framework for the research on public texts. A pilot study is conducted to demonstrate the instrumentality of such methodology in light of the alterations of a traffic sign in reality. The case serves as an exemplar of the geosemiotic prominence in relation to a sign's meaning system.