Meat, guns, and God

A trend exists in linguistic landscape research to examine urban spaces. Interest in urban spaces is a logical expression of ongoing migratory trends. While such research is helpful in advancing scholarship, there remains a need to examine how rural areas participate in the discursive construction of society. To address the recent urbanization of sociolinguistics, this paper examines how roadside billboards in rural areas of the United States discursively construct homeland messages. Using discourse analysis and drawing from linguistic landscape scholarship, the study explores how billboards draw from banal and sentimental homeland messages to forward a contentious issue, support a political candidate, and imagine a collective American identity. These discourses feed into, and are a part of, a larger network of ideologies that fabricate authentic notions of nationhood. The findings demonstrate that roadside billboards reflect a past time that flattens the cultural diversity of a nation into a static national image.

語言景觀研究的一個趨勢是城市空間研究。對城市空間研究的關注合理反映了持續存在的人口流動趨勢。儘管這類研究有助於推進學術發展，仍有需要探索鄉村地區如何參與社會話語建構的問題。本文通過考察美國鄉村路邊廣告牌如何構建民族話語，揭示了近年來城市化進程中的社會語言學效應。通過話語分析和語言景觀文獻引用，本文探討了廣告牌如何利用老生常談，善感的民族話語提出有爭議議題，支持政黨候選人以及構想美國的集體身分認同。這些話語注入並成為更廣的意識形態網絡的一部分，進而構建了真實的國家概念。研究結果表明，路邊廣告牌反映了昔日那段由國家文化多元性到被碾平成靜止國家形象的轉變‭。