“When size matters”

Abstract

This paper examines the in-built message modality of Republican Party campaign yard signage in the 2016 U.S. Presidential race, and argues for a ‘reading’ in which known and unknown contender biographical details and idiolectal patterns form a key component in analyses using material ethnography. Examining the grammar of visuality in which typographic choice, toponymic-allusion, punctuational detail, as well as onomastics and embedded speech acts emerge ripe in literal and metaphoric meaning, the paper demonstrates how acts of intertextual chaining of political history and candidate biography re-affirm the need for interpretive frameworks which are dynamic – not static – and which are simultaneously incorporative of exophoric text-context accounts of witnessed signage. The in-built potential of campaign yard signage in triggering contagious and conspicuous acts of affective stance-taking particularly in neighborhoods of geospatial contiguity are examined both for how they fit into LL research, as well as for how they prod further innovation in its interdisciplinary-inspired and evolving frameworks of analysis.

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…What most of those studies have in common is an approach in which the special and unique aspects of signs are foregrounded, usually in their specific historical and social context. Pandey (2017) pointedly critiqued the 'acontextual', 'static', 'stills-oriented' and 'receptor-centric' approaches in linguistic landscape research, and calls for in-depth qualitative accounts that seek to uncover the back stories behind signs in order to uncover deeper meanings.…”