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Article published In: Linguistic Landscape
Vol. 3:1 (2017) ► pp.25–55

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“When size matters”

Multimodality, material ethnography and signage in Trump’s race to the White House

 | Salisbury University
Published online: 29 June 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.3.1.02pan
Abstract
This paper examines the in-built message modality of Republican Party campaign yard signage in the 2016 U.S. Presidential race, and argues for a ‘reading’ in which known and unknown contender biographical details and idiolectal patterns form a key component in analyses using material ethnography. Examining the grammar of visuality in which typographic choice, toponymic-allusion, punctuational detail, as well as onomastics and embedded speech acts emerge ripe in literal and metaphoric meaning, the paper demonstrates how acts of intertextual chaining of political history and candidate biography re-affirm the need for interpretive frameworks which are dynamic – not static – and which are simultaneously incorporative of exophoric text-context accounts of witnessed signage. The in-built potential of campaign yard signage in triggering contagious and conspicuous acts of affective stance-taking particularly in neighborhoods of geospatial contiguity are examined both for how they fit into LL research, as well as for how they prod further innovation in its interdisciplinary-inspired and evolving frameworks of analysis.
Article outline
  • 1.Political yard signs and linguistic landscape research
  • 2.Yard signs: A brief history
    • 2.1Yard signs and LL research
  • 3.Yard signs in one neighborhood: Points vs. periods in time
  • 4.LL and expanding artifacts of study
  • 5.The man behind the signs
  • 6.The politics of onomastics: Names, not trees
  • 7.The sociolinguistics of “big”
  • 8.Enhancing bigness: The role of verbal intensification
  • 9.But, back to the empire and its signs
  • 10.Do font size, saliency and punctuation matter?
  • 11.Trump’s tagline: Examining etymology and effect
  • 12.Concluding remarks: Implications for LL
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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