A Study On The Linguistic Landscape Of A Coastal City

In recent years,linguistic landscape is one of the emerging fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics,which has been paid more and more attention by scholars both at theoretical and empirical aspects.Researchers investigate linguistic landscape in a variety of contexts and cultures and explore the potential reasons,social status,power and ideology behind language choice.The present study examines the linguistic landscape of Qingdao West Coast Commercial Street,focusing on the linguistic landscape in terms of language usage and structural characteristics and explaining reasons for the language choice.Two specific research questions are asked: 1)What are the characteristics of language choice in the linguistic landscape in the west coast commercial street? 2)What are the reasons for different language choice?Based on Scollon’s and Scollon’s analytical framework--geosemiotics,the characteristics are analyzed at the aspects of language form,language prominence,different characteristics in business fronts and sign types.It employs Ben-Rafael,Shohamy et al’s theory of structuration principle--the principle of presentation-of-self,good-reasons,power relations and collective identity to explore the reasons for language choice.The data was collected in October 2017 in Qingdao West Coast Commercial Street,and a total number of 569 signs were obtained.Random interviews were made in order to better understand the data and people’s understanding of their language choice.There is no fixed quota for the number of random interviewees.We find the right time to interview passers-by,residents and business people,and analyze the collected photo corpus to ensure the accuracy of the research results.After a thorough examination of the data,some findings are made:First,the study clearly shows a multilingual trend in the linguistic landscape in Qingdao West Coast Commercial Street.In the aspect of language prominence and code preference--no matter in the order and the size of language,Chinese is the most frequently and widely used language,especially on signs of restaurants,clothingshops and beauty salon.English is also a common language on the signs,especially widely distributed among signs of clothing shops,and leisure places.In addition to Chinese and English,Korean,Japanese and French also appear in the linguistic landscape,mainly on signs of restaurants and massage shops.It embodies the language use situation of people in this region.At the aspect of sign types,Chinese and English are the main language in business names and brand names.Second,we explore the reasons for language choice.From the signs collected and interviewed data,we can know that all the four structuration principles are reflected in language choice.Their influence is not equal to each other.The choice of Chinese is influenced by four principles and mainly influenced by power-relations,good-reasons and collective identity principle.English is influenced by presentation-of-self and good-reasons principle.Other languages are mainly influenced by collective identity principle.Compared with other scholars investigation,all the four structuration principles are reflected in the language choice on the signs of west coast commercial street and they have influence on language choice.