Linguistic Landscape Across The Central Beijing Municipality:A Multimodal Perspective

Linguistic landscape,currently one of the heated topics in the field of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics,has drawn much attention from scholars abroad and meanwhile loads of achievements have been made.It was the Canadian scholar Rodrigue Landry and Richard Y.Bourhis who first used ?linguistic landscape‘ as a term in their academic work,in which such items as road signs,advertising billboards,shop names,building names and the like that are visible in public places are put under the name of linguistic landscape.Linguistic landscape researchers abroad have the inclination to focus on bilingualism or multilingualism(the co-existence of different linguistic codes)as a perspective in analyzing linguistic landscapes.In China,linguistic landscape has just drawn the attention in the linguistic world so to speak.Not so many scholars embark on the empirical study of linguistic landscape.Based on the theoretical foundation of Halliday‘s systemic-functional grammar and also Kress and van Leeuwen‘s image grammar,and using a multimodal perspective,this thesis centers on the linguistic landscapes(building names,institution names,shop signs,advertising billboards,posters and caution signs)collected in the three selected representative areas(Zhongguancun,Xidan Commercial Street and Liulichang Cultural Street),focuses on the features and their meaning potential conveyed by linguistic modalities as well as non-linguistic modalities(mainly visual),exploring the modality distribution of the three major types of linguistic landscapes,the features and meaning potential of individual modality and also the interplay between modalities and the resulted meanings.Finally,a certain space will be dedicated to the discussion on linguistic landscape in relation to space.The study presents the following findings:(1)In terms of the modality distribution,generally the linguistic landscapes in Liulichang Cultural Street shows obvious difference from those in Zhongguancun and Xidan Commercial Street.It seems that apart from the caution signs(almost half of the caution signs in this area are multimodal),the linguistic landscapes in Liulichang are prone to be mono-modal(displaying solely the linguistic content)while in Zhongguancun and Xidan Commercial Street the linguistic landscapes tend to make use of both linguistic modality and visual modality.Another finding is that in Zhongguancun and Xidan Commercial Street the multimodal advertising takes up the highest proportion and even in Liulichang where linguistic modality is more focused the share for multimodal adverts is high.(2)The name signs in the three areas demonstrate some similar linguistic features in terms of experiential structure,which tend to be the common features for this type of linguistic landscape.Basically,the names for buildings,institutions and shops present two major types of pattern:(a)the nominal group with common noun as ?Thing‘ and(b)the nominal group with proper noun as ?Thing‘.Furthermore,name signs in different contexts also show some differences in the selection of words,which is inextricably linked with the features and functions of the different places under investigation.Visual-wise,the most frequent type of visual process appearing on name signs in all the three regions examined is Analytical process visual,which in most cases performs the image act of ?Offer‘.(3)The multimodal advertising in both Zhongguancun and Xidan Commercial Street takes up the largest proportion,which indicates that both modalities play a significant role in promoting services or products in adverts and posters and the combination of two modalities contains rich meaning potential.In terms of the linguistic content,the group,the material clause and relational clause are dominant in adverting.Interpersonally,the clauses mainly perform the speech functions of ?Command‘ and ?Statement‘.As to the visuals,Action process,Reactional process and Analytical process images are dominant in billboards and posters in both areas.In Xidan,Reactional process visuals take up the largest share.In terms of the interactional meaning of visuals,for the most part visual messages in advertising-type LL in both Zhongguancun and Xidan perform the image act of ?offer‘.But in Xidan,a large proportion of visuals perform the image act of ?demand‘.Unlike the cases in Zhongguancun and Xidan,mono-modal advertising billboards and posters in Liulichang are dominant.Most adverts or posters use linguistic modality in providing information and promoting products and services.Another point is that groups rather than clauses are frequently printed in advertising billboards in Liulichang.Ancient Chinese characters also have an important role to play in this area.(4)The standardized caution signs in line with the national standards can be found in all the three areas investigated.A large proportion of caution signs in Xidan Commercial Street are multimodal,displaying both linguistic modality and visual images.Liulichang Cultural Street has the problem of having inadequate caution signs.Most caution signs in Liulichang are not in line with the national standards for caution signs and quite a lot of signs are simply some words written on papers to inform or warn the passers-by,which are informal.Visually,Analytical and Action process images are dominant in caution signs.These visual images mostly perform the ?Offer‘ image act.(5)The features of linguistic landscape are reflective of the characteristics of the research context.