A Study Of Linguistic Landscapes In The Beijing 798 Art Zone From The Perspective Of Agency And Structure

The study of linguistic landscape is one of the important and hot issues in the interdisciplinary study of Sociolinguistics and Sociology of language.Since research in the field starts late in China and is in the stage of development,there is still various linguistic landscape to be explored as well as new approaches and theories through which researchers can ulteriorly investigate the implicit meanings underlying the explicit functions in the in-depth study.Therefore,this paper investigates linguistic landscape of the Beijing 798 Art Zone from the perspective of agency and structure in the study of Language Policy and Planning(LPP),in order to explore the interaction between agency and structure based on the geosemiotic analysis of the various landscapes in the research area.On the one hand,the attempt to introduce a new research perspective and theoretical framework in the research provides a new approach for future research;on the other hand,the research aims to extend the range of research objects by taking graffiti,illegal advertisements,and other atypical linguistic landscape into consideration,and provides the audience with a new perspective of urban symbolic expression in China.The case study is conducted in the Beijing 798 Art Zone.Drawing on the qualitative approach,the research collects the research data through photography,semistructured interviews,and open-ended questionnaire.The photos are analyzed in the geosemiotic frame and categorized into three discursive frames-symbolic frame(including graffiti and slogans),practical frame(including illegal advertisements and commercial signs)and informational frame(including guiding signs),to find out the agency of different producers of linguistic landscape.The contents from interviews and questionnaire are coded to verify the assumptions inferred from geosemiotic analysis.The research shows:(1)linguistic landscape in the 798 Art Zone includes graffiti,illegal advertisements,commercial signs,remained slogans of former factories,and the agents involved in its production are graffiti artists,owners of illegal advertisements,shops owners,and administrators of the zone,respectively with their own agency;(2)linguistic landscape of different types as well as different agency in certain places interact with each other due to the power relationship that forms a hierarchy.It constructs an ecological system of linguistic landscape,where the power relationship as well as the hierarchy results in the divergence of distribution,such as the location at the focal or peripheral place,the size of occupied space,and whether they are overlapping or not;(3)agency and structure are mutually constructive--on the one hand,structure constrains or enables agency,with globalization and English as lingua franca functioning as enabling power while national language policy and local regulatory norms mainly as constraining power.On the other hand,agency can change structure,or sometimes transform itself to structure through conventionalization of the produced realities when administrators accept the situation created by agents;(4)The administrators act as a mediator that switches between agency and structure due to their dual identity of and stance conversion between the executors of national policy and local regulatory norms and members of an institution with interest.In short,from the perspective of agency and structure,this paper draws on a geosemiotic approach to provide an overview of linguistic landscape in the Beijing 798 Art Zone with an attempt to explore how agency and structure affect and interact with each other.