Englisch i.d. Wr. Sprachlandsch

This project investigates meaning-making through the choice of English on written public signs in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Vienna, Austria. Crucially, the project focuses on the under-researched aspect of the sign-readers’ perspective, theoretically modeling and empirically mapping the steps involved between encountering English use on a sign, and interactionally interpreting its message (e.g. signaling of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘modernity’).
The project is grounded in a constructionist epistemology that holds that communicative messages emerge in an interactional-dialogic process of anticipation, interpretation, and negotiation between language ‘producers’ and ‘recipients’. Readers of public signage use language choice (variation) as an interpretative cue in this process, ‘contextualizing’ a text in terms of the social (symbolic) meanings indexed by the chosen language and deriving messages accordingly.
The project addresses the steps involved in the perceptual and interpretative activities that LL sign-readers engage in under such a perspective, in an interlocking series of study modules, anchored in the Viennese context:
Module 1: ‘Locating and describing English language use in the Viennese LL’
Module 2: ‘Establishing what constitutes English language use to Viennese LL sign-readers’
Module 3: ‘Establishing the social meanings Viennese LL sign-readers commonly associate with English language use’
Module 1 generates the empirical input for the perception-based studies of Modules 2-3: a corpus of Viennese LL-signs. At the same time, it features an analysis of this corpus regarding patterns of English language use, drawing on the tools and procedure of contemporary variation study. Module 2 empirically gauges the ‘folk’ perceptual delimitation of English and German by Viennese LL sign-readers, using a lexical decision task experiment. Module 3 maps the social meanings (symbolism, attitudes, ideologies) associated with English by a Viennese audience of LL sign-readers, by means of a ‘matched-guise’ (language-attitude) study and focus-group discussions.
English has spread on a global level, as evidenced on public signs and elsewhere; it is vital to come to understand how this spread is motivated and why it is ongoing. Arguing that the spread is partly driven by interactional and socio-cognitive meaning-making processes that pivot on the perception and meanings of English, this project develops and applies a sophisticated research strategy by which the recipients’ essential role in these processes can effectively be captured. The focus on the receptive aspects of language choice is the central, original contribution of the present study to sociolinguistics. This contribution has significant implications also for related fields in the social sciences and humanities, and for the general public, as we all seek to understand and navigate the ecology of languages around us.