2023 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Linguistic Landscapes: Life 'with Corona'
| Project/Area Number |
22K00519
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| Research Institution | Meijo University |
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Principal Investigator |
池 沙弥 名城大学, 外国語学部, 准教授 (10738214)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2022-04-01 – 2025-03-31
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| Keywords | Linguistic Landscape / COVID-19 / directive speech act / signage / positioning |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The major achievement was that the analysis of the data in the previous year was written up and published in Australian Journal of Linguistics, entitled "COVID-19 discourse in linguistic landscape: Linguistic and semiotic analysis of directive signs" (Ike & Hori, 2023).
We have further collected signage data in three places thie year, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Hakata. The data over time all suggest that no additional signs were produced since the reclassification of Covid-19 in 2023 to Class 5, the same as influenza.
The fieldwork revealed the following; First,large franchaised shops such as convenience stores and restaurants removed all the signs related to Covid-19. Second, however, more signs remained visible in older districts in the surveyed area such as shopping arcades. Most of the remaining signs were the top-down signs issued by the local government, indicating that the shop satisfied all the necessary conditions as suggested. Especially small restaurants still had thoese government-issued stickers at their door, but other temporary signs were mostly removed. Third, there were still quite a few hand sanitisers, but without any signs most of the time. Fourth, there was no increase in multilingual signs even after Japan started to welcome overseas tourists again.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
The reclassification happened earlier than expected, and signs faded fairly quickly afterwords, leading the researcher to reconsider the course of research direction.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
It became clear that Covid-LL significantly decreased in Japan, but with the changes in international economic situations there are more tourists from overseas. Linguistic landscapes need to be continuously documented in Japan, but the re-emergence of Engish signs for tourists need to be documented and analysed in comparison to other parts of the world from a perspective of English as a Lingua Franca, too.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Due to the changes of reserach direction after the reclassification of Covid-19, there will be international fieldworks in the following year as well as continued data collection in Japan.
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