By Sjaak Kroon, Dong Jie and Jan Blommaert

Introduction

In a globalizing world, we need to consider language as a complex of mobile resources, shaped and developed both because of mobility – by people moving around – and for mobility – to enable people to move around. This assumption is central to what we call the sociolinguistics of globalization, and it is a paradigmatic shift away from an older linguistic and sociolinguistic tradition in which language was analyzed primarily as a local, resident and stable complex of signs attached to an equally local, resident and stable community of speakers. The paradigm shift compels us to reconsider many of the stock assumptions of linguistics and sociolinguistics, notably emphasizing permanent instability and dynamics rather than structural transparency and stasis, and thus constructing radically different notions of ‘order’ in the linguistic and sociolinguistic system. The order we now observe is no longer an order inscribed in stable structural (and therefore generalized) features of language, but an order inscribed in the trajectories of change and development within the system. Change is the system, and observed stability in the system is a necessarily situated snapshot of a stage in a developmental trajectory in which the current state is an outcome of previous ones and a condition for future ones (Blommaert 2010; Blommaert & Rampton 2011; Pennycook 2010).

In this paper, we intend to engage with an issue which is at the core of this paradigmatic shift: the question of meaning-making in a system which we see as intrinsically unstable and dynamic. Meaning is, of course, quite an exhausted topic in the study of language and signs (and in this paper we shall address signs that contain language). From this tremendous amount of literature and debate we need to select a small handful of basic items. The first one is the commonsense observation that meaning is inevitably based on shared recognition of signs as being meaningful for the parties engaged in interaction. If I use the word ‘man’, I assume that you recognize it as meaning the same thing for both of us. If not, there is a problem of meaning-making. Connected to this point, we see such recognition as being normative by definition: we recognize signs as being meaningful, because we share conventions (i.e. norms) for recognizing and identifying such meanings. The second thing we need to adopt from the literature on meaning is that meaning is inevitably connected to the structure of signs – the grammatical patterns in sentences, the phonological rules underlying word formation, the indexical load signs give off, a particular spatial arrangement in visual signs (e.g. reading from left to right or from top to bottom) and so forth. I can only make sense when the signs I produce have a recognizable structure, which marks its shared meaning for you and enables you to decode the sign as meaning this-or-that.

Mobility of signs evidently complicates several matters. Much of the literature on meaning assumes an a priori sharedness of both elements; it assumes the stability of signs-as-structures as well as of the conventions for decoding the sign as meaningful. This a priori stability accounts for some of the sociological naïvité of which linguistics and sociolinguistics have been repeatedly accused. In a world in which signs and sign users travel across entirely different societies and cultures, of course, no such a prioris can be made; quite the contrary, the non-sharedness of such elements ought to be the point of departure for every consideration of meaning-making in an age of globalization. We know that mobility of signs and sign users involves complex processes of decoding and interpetation; and we know that when signs travel, their shape moves rather unproblematically from one place to another, while other features of the sign – meanings, indexicals, social value and so forth – do not travel too well. An accent in English that is perceived as prestigious and valuable in Nairobi may index low levels of education and migrant identity in London, for instance.

What is required, therefore, is (a) to establish the relationship between spatiotemporal mobility and meaning, in which meaning is in itself seen as an effect of mobility (I can understand you because you and I can relocate ourselves into a space of shared meaningfulness); and (b) we need to dig into the structure of signs in an attempt to produce a detailed account about which features of signs exactly allow, invite or enable the necessary sharedness that produces meaning, and which features do not. Those two questions will guide us in this paper; in order to answer them we shall analyze some signs that are rather straightforward, even typical globalization objects: public signs in English, found in tourist hotspots in the People’s Republic of China. 

Such signs would often be discussed in the context of ‘world Englishes’, and the assumption that the signs are ‘in English’ is in itself quite questionable. Such signs, as we shall see shortly, look English but can best be understood from within a local economy of signs and meanings in which ‘world Englishes’ is hardly relevant as a target of interpretation. We shall not delve deeper into this discussion; rather, we shall see the signs as semiotic artefacts in which specific resources are being blended in an attempt to make sense to mobile people – foreign tourists to whom ‘English’ appears more accessible than ‘Chinese’. Detailing what these resources are is part of the exercise here; and the bottom line question is: when we talk about signs that move around the globe, what exactly is mobile? When are texts truly moving? Before engaging with the materials that are central in this paper, we need to pause and reflect on some general semiotic principles. Contrary to the Saussurean doctrine, signs are not random; we must therefore situate them before we can move on.

Keywords: sociolinguistics, texts, meaning-making, signs, mobility

How to quote (APA):  Kroon, S., Dong, J., & Blommaert, J. (2011). Truly Moving Texts. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 3).

Read the full working paper Truly Moving Texts here.