The semiotics of multilingual wordplay in linguistic landscapes: Communicative settings, the hearer-origo, and contextual knowledge

Abstract

Notions like linguistic vs. social context, or co-text and context, as well as the range of phenomena to be included within these categories have been intensely discussed in previous research. The present paper approaches these issues from a usage-based perspective. I will focus on selected examples of multilingual wordplay in advertising messages in the Linguistic Landscape (LL). Multilingual wordplay appears to be particularly informative, as it implies that several linguistic codes are involved. Moreover, linguistic utterances which form part of the LL are characterised by spatial boundedness and may refer to various kinds of situational facts. In addition, this paper aims at reflecting upon the semiotic and communicative foundations of LL advertising. It will be argued that the messages are mostly characterised by communicative distance between the speaker and the addressees, but that a more immediate communicative setting is often simulated, involving a referential shift to the hearer-origo functioning as the basic point of reference. The spatial boundedness of LL messages can be interpreted from a general semiotic perspective, which underlines the importance of different types of contextual information. I will finally argue that the different types of knowledge involved can be systematised with the help of two distinctions: 1) linguistic vs. extra-linguistic knowledge, and 2) knowledge related to the concrete situation of communication vs. general, situation-independent knowledge.