Panelista. Disputes in the semiotic landscape: The temporal dimension

CARRANZA, ISOLDA E.

Madrid

Congreso; 14th Linguistic Landscape Workshop Utopia and Dystopia International Symposium; 2023

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid y Universidad Complutense

With a sociolinguistic and discourse-analytical perspective interested in ordinary people’s everyday life, this study deals with sociocultural practices linked to a semiotic landscape. It comprises both the social activities which involve the use of the external walls of certain institutional buildings and the representations in the discourse produced there. The focus is on the relations between two sets of co-existing (often overlapping) texts, their meanings and the practices which originate them, with the objective of exploring the social and cultural gaps they indicate. The conceptual tools 'contemporaneity', 'historicity' and 'generation' applied here prove to be fruitful. I argue in favor of an approach of 'place' which integrates the treatment of the time coordinates of the semiotic product, the expressed discourse and the subjects involved.The observation site is a university campus of urban characteristics and open to the free circulation of cars and passers-by. The data have been obtained through a prolonged ethnographic fieldwork that included the interaction with some textual producers. One subcorpus consists of commemorative plaques, the names of internal streets and the murals produced by student centers. The large pictorial inscriptions constitute a legitimated use of walls funded by institutional authorities. Another corpus congregates graffitis –with diacritics, stylized calligraphy or distorted letters– which contain English words or phrases. Their producers use the campus for roller-skating, skate-boarding and acrobatic cycling. The findings underscore the contrasts in the historical times alluded to in the discourses, in the occupation of the territory, and in the textual producers’ age group and social stratum. It is concluded that the tensions present in the landscape, including those that involve prefigured or past worlds, call for acknowledging the manifestations of the temporal dimension on every plane of analysis.