In this book, drawing upon photographic data from various fieldwork sites such as Ireland and North America, Kallen not only systematically reviews current issues of linguistic landscapes (LL), but also develops the scope of inquiries by opening up analytical perspectives that include different elements fundamental to LL. The book systematically introduces elements of LL (chapter 1) and reviews history of LL studies and problems that the researchers encounter (chapter 2), which illuminates the significance of LL not simply as text-bearing objects but inherently as a dynamic component of culture and society.
Following this, the book unfolds three dimensions of LL. In chapter 3, Kallen focuses on choices of codes for meaning-expression. This helps identify language policy and planning according to (dis)recognition of the visibility of language(s), and ‘communicative outcomes when two or more languages are present within LL units’ (57) based on symmetric, complementary, or contesting relationships between informative message, code forms, and layout of LL sign units. Beyond code choices, this book concerns another two elements of space and people. Chapter 4 demonstrates the capacity of LL units to index zones of the proximal ‘near’ and remote ‘there’ against situated hereness, which can be applied to divide/regulate referenced space. Chapter 5 further illustrates how these spatial qualities are correlated with social qualities as ‘personal relationships at various scales of organisation’ (125), which is achieved by linguistic indexicals of speaker's social categories.
Chapter 6 insightfully proposes LL units as acts of discourse, mediating interactive relationships between sign instigators and viewers with certain pragmatic intents. It shows genre as accesses to LL discourses and the applicability of framing and intertextuality to identify LL genres. Genre complexity is further discussed, viewing LL units as an assemblage and the co-existence of multiple discourses. To grasp the dynamics of this interactive nature of LL, chapter 7 adds a temporal dimension, showing different ways in which the LL marks the historical past and their influences on the viewer's present.
Finally, problems of LL scope, methodological diversity, and future research orientations are summarized in chapter 8. The chapter argues LL units as ‘entextualized, material performances of public discourse’ (248) including both written and oral discourses. It further develops a systematic model involving the textual, material, and discoursal levels of LL in relation to timespace. This chapter also shifts scholarly attention to other ‘-scapes’ and the emerging direction of virtual landscapes. Methodologically, it suggests the inclusion of portable materials and the importance of ethnographic immersion in obtaining ‘knowledge and cultural practices of people who create and engage in the discourse of LL’ (302).
Overall, this book offers a panorama of sociolinguistic approaches towards linguistic landscapes, which enables researchers to conduct meaningful research from multiple dimensions of LL signs—communicative choices, indexicals of space, interactive relationships, and traces of historicity. In this way, these ‘dynamic relations of text, materiality, and discourse in the public eye’ (302) unveil how public signages with displayed multi-semiotic resources become sites of posthumanist ‘affordance’ to construct lived social experiences.
