语言与空间:语言景观研究视角

Language and Space: A Perspective of Linguistic Landscape

作为社会语言学的一个全新研究领域,语言景观研究通过对公共空间标识的分析,解读了语言与空间的关系,反映了现实世界中存在的语言冲突、语言接触、语言维持、语言变迁和语族活力等各种不同的语言现象,并揭示了语言使用与选择背后所蕴含的显性或隐性语言优势、权力关系和社会地位。本文回顾了近些年国内外语言景观研究的发展,详尽描述了语言景观研究的内容,包括狭义语言景观、符号景观和地理符号学,讨论了当前研究理论和研究方法的五大争论:(1)样本的代表性和采样范围;(2)样本的分析单元;(3)样本的分类;(4)标牌的作者权、主要功能和目标读者;(5)定量还是定性分析,并对未来国内语言景观研究提出了个人看法。

As a brand-new research field of sociolinguistics, the study of linguistic landscape interprets the relationship between language and space by means of analyzing the variety of linguistic signs in public space such as public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings, which in general can be divided into top-down signs and bottom-up signs and which are equipped with informative function and symbolic function. The article reviews the chronological development of linguistic landscape studies at home and abroad, expounds the research contents in detail which contain Linguistic Landscape in a narrow sense represented by Landry & Bourhis(1997), Gorter(2006a, 2006b) and Backhaus(2007), Semiotic Landscape by Jaworski & Thurlow(2010a, 2010b) and Geosemiotics by Scollon & Scollon(2003), and has a thorough and in-depth discussion about theoretical and methodological argumentations of this study in the following five aspects of(1) the samples' representativeness and scope,(2) the sample's unit of analysis,(3) the samples' categorizations,(4) the signs' authorship, primary functions and intended readers, and(5) quantitative or qualitative analysis. This study reflects the diverse linguistic phenomena in terms of language conflict, language contact, language maintenance, language change and ethnolinguistic vitality, so on and so forth, which demonstrate overt or covert linguistic prestige, power relations and social status embodied in the language use and language choice. In the end, the article puts forward personal views about the prospective linguistic landscape studies in China.