The ordinary semiotic landscape of an unordinary place: spatiotemporal disjunctures in Incheon's Chinatown

Abstract

The ordinary semiotic landscape of an unordinary place: Spatiotemporal disjunctures in Incheon's Chinatown This article examines the semiotic landscape of the Chinatown in Incheon, South Korea. Using the geosemiotic framework as a heuristic guide, we analyze how the spectacle of Chinatown is constituted through spatial, linguistic, semiotic, and material resources, and find that the unordinariness of the place is contingent on and emerges through its juxtaposition with ordinary space, practice, and language use. We suggest this apparent paradox can be understood through the process of scaling, during which signs and practices that might have been considered quotidian become monumentalised and ritualised when they are transported across timescales and spatial scales. Incheon's Chinatown then affords an opportunity to understand the semiotic and material production of 'unordinariness' through 'ordinariness'. These collective spatiotemporal disjunctures or juxtapositions reveal unexpected but nonetheless crucial intersections among language, semiotics, and nationness.

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…For example, both Lou (2010Lou ( , 2016a and Leeman and Modan (2009) applied an analysis based on geosemiotics to the linguistic landscape of the Chinatown in Washington, DC (see also Chapter 3). Likewise, Lee and Lou (2019) examined the Chinatown of the city of Incheon in South Korea through the lens of geosemiotics, as did Zhao (2021) in Paris. Also drawing on geosemiotics, Xu and Wang (2021) focused on restaurants in a Chinatown in Sydney, combining their approach with Blommaert's (2013) ethnographic perspective.…”

“…The authors concluded that adding the nighttime as a lens to linguistic landscape studies can offer valuable insights. Lee and Lou (2019) examined the reinvention of the Chinatown in the city of Incheon in South Korea. Overall, the authors observed that Korean was more frequently used than Chinese in the signage, but visually Chinese was more prominent.…”

The construction of Chineseness in the Chinatowns of the Hague and Amsterdam.

“…Landry and Bourhis (1997) have defined signs as public road signs, public signs on government buildings, street names, place names, advertising billboards and commercial shop signs. The six types are categorised as 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' signs (Dixson, 2015;Fakhiroh & Rohmah, 2018;Landry & Bourhis, 1997;Lee & Lou, 2019). The former four types: public road signs, public signs on government buildings, street names, place names, can be defined as 'top-down signs', which means they are issued by national and public bureaucracy and public institutions.…”

The Linguistic Landscape as an Identity Construction Site of a United States’ Higher Educational Institution in the Time of COVID-19

“…Linguistic landscape studies have shown how languages and semiotics co-construct the identities of people involved in the area and of the place (Gorter 2006;Pütz and Mundt 2018), making the interconnectivity and complexity of people, space, action, and language that comprise spatial identity visible (Benwell and Stokoe 2006). These studies tend to conclude that language and signs not only deliver information to be read by speakers of the language but also fulfil multiple purposes for which they are translingually used, including the construction of new meanings for existing language and space (Gorter and Cenoz 2015a; Lee and Lou 2019;Pennycook 2017). That is, existing language associated with a sign is given new meanings by how it is portrayed when consumed as part of a particular discourse by a certain group.…”