Construction of Private Space in An Urban Semioscape: A Case Study in the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation

Abstract

Abstract Across the world urban semioscapes emerge from multiple and mutually interlocking social activities of the members of sociocultural groups and are established through the deployment of layered configurations of semiotic resources and discourses which index patterns of these activities as well as the underlying norms and values of these groups. A particularly conspicuous semiotic practice which has established itself as a distinct semiotic layer in Slovakia’s urban semioscape is one through which social agents declare certain segments of space as private. By erecting ‘private property’ signs they impose a certain ‘power regime’ on a physical territory but also imprint upon that space a particular ideological meaning. This practice is particularly salient in Slovakia’s geopolitical environment in which the notion of ‘privateness’ was excluded from official ideology under socialism. As language is a principal semiotic mode for the construction of the practice of constructing private space, the practice can also be looked upon as a sociolinguistic phenomenon indexing the post-1989 political and economic transformation processes in Slovakia; that is, the re-establishment of ‘private ownership’ within the larger processes of ‘rectification’ which post-socialist societies underwent in the transformation period. My argument is that the practice is a manifestation of geocultural globalisation on a local scale-level which leads to the emergence of new forms of locality. In the paper I employ Blommaert’s (2010) innovative conceptual toolbox of the sociolinguistics of globalisation’ along with the analytical practices and procedures of geosemiotics and linguistic landscape, and apply them to the corpus of signs which I believe index this practice and establish the topography of private space’ in the urban semioscape examined.