Turn-taking in the interactive Linguistic Landscape

What is it about?

Building on Linguistic Landscape research that highlights its interactivity, we examine how interaction is a crucial element in the creation of meaning in the LL. Our analysis draws on the concept of turn-taking from conversation analysis, in applying the concept of turn, i.e. individual interactants’ contributions to conversation, and introducing its counterpart in the LL. Pairing this with the principles of geosemiotics and Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA), we demonstrate that LLs can consist of interlinked semiotic turns that proceed similarly to turns of a conversation. Combining turn-taking, geosemiotics and ELLA encourages us to go beyond the fixation of ‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ and ‘transgressive’ processes. Not only does the LL hold an ever-present possibility of an interactive response but we show that actors attend to the turn-taking mechanism that includes consistent approaches to dealing with discernible interactants, taking turns, and turn-design.

Featured Image

Photo by Kai Oberhäuser on Unsplash

Photo by Kai Oberhäuser on Unsplash

Why is it important?

These findings suggest a need to incorporate the LL’s inherent interactivity into analyses of it, rather than allowing those analyses to stop at the boundaries of single semiotic turns. Only in that way can semiotic turns within the LL be seen as responding to each other, and reveal the ways in which they connect to broader social discourses outside of the immediate linguistic landscape. Such interactivity needs to become a part of our analysis that we must always consider if we want to understand the linguistic landscape in all its richness.