Indexicality and Intertextuality in Multimodal Language Policy Analysis
LPReN #3: Social Justice, Hegemony, and Complicity in Language Policy
The field of language policy and planning (LPP) has traditionally been focused on policy documents and other written texts as foundational data sources. In recent years, however, empirical investigations of language practices, ideologies, and sociolinguistic norms in a wide variety of contexts have engendered a re-conceptualization of what counts as "language policy". This paper presents a framework for multimodal language policy analysis. While language policy scholars have utilized discipline-specific methodological techniques to analyze language in public spaces in, for example, linguistic landscape analyses (Hult, 2018), this paper proposes leveraging the tools from Critical Discourse Studies and Semiotics to examine how a wide range of images and public signs – or "the full range of possible sign vehicles" (Keane, 2018) – deploy, and are appropriated for, language ideologies and policies.
This is part of a larger project focused on developing and refining LPP-specific research methods that are not tethered to their disciplinary homes (Hult & Johnson, 2015). In this paper, I explore a transdisciplinary approach (Halliday, 1990) to language policy analysis, that relies on research in semiotics and indexicality. In particular, I utilize Silverstein's (2003) notion of "indexical order" to examine how public signage indexes macro-social frames, including language policies and ideologies. I argue that the meaning of these signs emerges as a product of intertextuality, or what Agha (2005) calls "semiosis across encounters" whereby features of discourse establish forms of connectivity across speech events. The signs analyzed in this paper comprise bounded speech acts that index larger sociohistorical frameworks. Of particular concern is empirically capturing connections between micro and macro discourses. However, this analysis also raises questions about definitions of what counts as "language policy". While an expanded definition of "language policy" has been incorporated to interrogate issues of social justice and hegemony in language policy, I end with a critique of the idea that language ideologies and practices are language policies.
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