Chapter 5 is perhaps the least informative.

Overall, The Interactional Instinct is a

book worth reading, as it is very informative in both the facts that are discussed
and the literature covered, and it defends a position that in the very least
deserves more attention. I have found it stimulating.
Reviewed by Salikoko S. Mufwene
The University of Chicago, USA
E-mail: s-mufwene@uchicago.edu
doi:10.1093/applin/amr043 Advance Access published on 9 December 2011
REFERENCES
Beckner, C., R. Blythe, J. Bybee,
M. H. Christiansen, W. Croft, N. Ellis,
J. Holland, J. Ke, D. Larsen-Freeman, and
Tom Schoenemann. 2009. Language is a
complex adaptive system: a position paper,
Language Learning 59 (Suppl.), 126.
Hopper, P. J. 1987. Emergent grammar. Papers
from the 13th meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society, pp. 13957.
Hopper, P. J. 1998. Emergent grammar
in M. Tomasello (ed.): The New Psychology of
Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches
to Language Structure. Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc., pp. 15565.
Kretzschmar, W. A. 2009. The Linguistics of
Speech. Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. 2006. Cognition at the heart of
human interaction Discourse Studies: 8593
Martinet, A. 1960. Elements de linguistique
generale. Armand Colin.
Mufwene, S. S. 2001. The Ecology of Language
Evolution. Cambridge University Press.
Mufwene, S. S. 2008. Language Evolution: Contact,
Competition and Change. Continuum Press.
Steels, L. 2000. Language as a complex adaptive
system in M. Schoenauer et al. (eds): Parallel
Problem Solving from Nature (PPSSN 6). Springer,
pp. 1726.
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds): SEMIOTIC LANDSCAPES:
LANGUAGE, IMAGE, SPACE. Continuum Publishing, 2010.
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, two academics with joint appointments
in linguistics and communication studies, have collected excellent case studies
integrating analyses of material culture with sociolinguistics. As they state,
if not succinctly, they wish to foreground the interplay between language,
visual discourse, and the spatial practices and dimensions of culture, especially
the textual mediation or discursive construction of place and the use of space
as a semiotic resource in its own right (p. 1). Every worthwhile anthology
deserves a valuable introductory chapter. Unfortunately, it is precisely in this
regard that this collection breaks down and the excessively packed sentence
above is symptomatic of the editors failure. Recommending a readers
strategy, I suggest commencing with the articles.
I do not know when professors in fields other than semiotics decided to use
semiotic as an adjective and synonym for symbol, rather than master the
technicalities of semiotic analysis. As a semiotician, I find Jaworski and
REVIEWS 107

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Thurlows pedestrian and rather unscholarly attempt to tie the articulation
between meaning-based actions and socio-spatial processes involving material
culture troubling. Semiotics is the study of the life of signs in society, a
concise way of saying the same thing as above and according to the classic
definition of de Saussure (even though the term is Peirces; de Saussure used
semiology). Any conceived and constructed environment, according to semi-
otics is, technically, a signifying landscape. Jaworski and Thurlows burden,
which they ignore, is to apply semiotics to an object of analysis that they
consider semiotic. In keeping with the breezy way they jaunt through the
landscape of contemporary cultural studies, picking and choosing the bright
objects that catch their attention, there is little or no semiotics in this volume,
nor, any deep level analysis of signifying processes. The case studies presented
here succeed only because they add to the usual mix of sociolinguistic analysis
a pertinent attention to contemporary sign vehicles that are as important as
more traditional manifestations of environmental signification, such as how
our current landscape is a composite of images, words, modern media,
discourses, communication technologies, and subcultures meshed together in
urban space.
Secondly, the pedestrian way the editors weave aspects of contemporary
cultural studies into their introduction detracts from the quality of the other
contributions. Space is an important concept today. Jaworski and Thurlow
have read David Harvey. They mention Lefebvre (who is the source of
Harveys approach to Space), but they have not read him well. Discussing
Lefebvre, they once again regurgitate what has come to be a kind of signature
dilettantish reference of his threefold approach to socio-spatial meaning
perceived, conceived, livedas if this is all there is to the 400-plus pages of his
book, The Production of Space. They seem, too, not to have understood Harvey
well. The editors talk about modernism and relate it to socio-spatial aspects,
using quotes from one book, but surely, Harveys important contribution was
the way he analysed, not modernism, but postmodernism in that very
volume. It is not possible to understand contemporary culture, as Jaworski
and Thurlow try to do, without grasping the broad material and ongoing
issues associated with the study of postmodernism. So limited is their reading
and understanding of contemporary cultural studies that they ignore Jameson,
who literally created this field with one article that is universally known and
Baudrillard, who truly did integrate semiotics with cultural studies by using his
absolutely indispensable concept of sign value. When Thurlow and Jaworski
discuss our signifying landscape and the societal processes that are articulated
with it, they verbosely strain to say things that using sign value would help
them say quite directly and clearly (see Gottdiener 1995). Finally, there is no
more visible sign of their limited reading and understanding of contemporary
cultural studies than how they fall back on citing the ancient Kevin Lynch,
regurgitating him for a full paragraph into a discussion of space, instead
of referencing more recent work in the Lefebvrian tradition.
108 REVIEWS
The articles in this collection are a different matter. Of interest to sociolin-
guists and to scholars in communication studies concerned with societal pro-
cesses alike, the chapters expand our ways of thinking about signifying
practices tied to media and environmental culture. Several authors focus on
the way globalization in general or the transformation of societies to a
neo-Liberal capitalist economy, alters the signifying environment. Jeffrey L.
Kallens case study of Dublin identifies it as a multi-linguistic landscape.
He notes how globalization has changed the parameters of street-level signage
from the historical imperative of writing signs that make the most sense to a
given language community within the territory it inhabits, to those of more
universalistic signs. This includes the mixing of several language communities
as referents pertinent to the cultural diversity of globalized places. Missing
from this approach, which is essentially an extension of sociolinguistics and
Erving Goffmans frame analysis, is any recognition of another issue and one
that is most relevant to semiotics, namely, the phenomenon of polysemy. Signs
invariably mean different things to different people even within the same
language community. In this and other instances the articles collected here
ignore semiotics, despite the editors use of that term.
Mark Sebba, Nik Coupland and Susan Dray write on similar themes. They
observe how once uniform language communities have been transformed to
multiple symbolic domains by marginalized or non-hierarchically active sig-
nifying practices produced by population diversity. Sebba compares apartheid
South Africa and the Isle of Man in regard to ordinary and transitory consumer
goods, such as newspapers or bus tickets. His analysis foregrounds the way
minority modes of expression are marginalized, yet cannot be suppressed.
Couplands case study of Wales shows how, despite active government regu-
lation of language to preserve the purity of Welsh in the face of increasing
English use, everyday speech undermines this effort. Coupland, of course,
echoes the classic distinction made by de Saussure between langue and
parole. Susan Dray does something similar in her comparison between the
use of English and Jamaican Patois in everyday signage demonstrating how
the latter is just as significant a means of communication as the former for
community discourse. Squarely placed within the tradition of sociolinguistics,
these studies connect the quotidian with specific places and illustrate the
difference between structure and agency, even if they fail to demonstrate know-
ledge of sign analysis tying ideology to discourse or forms and substances of
expression to content in the semiotic sense.
Ingrid Piller reports on the transformation of Basel, Switzerlands
tourist-oriented sex industry according to new environmental signs that
appeal to global consumers. Analysis of ads, shop fronts and websites, supple-
ment other media forms neutralizing the image of sex by promoting clean fun
for tourists. Reversing her emphasis, Alastair Pennycock shows how graffiti is
an alternative expression of artistic and subcultural difference compared with
the normalized, commercial middle class images promoted in place by tourist
industry advertising. Thomas Mitchell presents another version of subcultural
REVIEWS 109
versus dominant cultural imaging. His Pittsburgh case study of how Spanish
language intrusion accompanies Mexican immigration into the city critiques
the view of the majority in the conception of scale and, therefore, as spreading
a false view inducing crisis. Rodney Jones adds to the mix of these studies a
reminder that, in addition to the real built environment, there is also a virtual
space where people interact. Thus, computer-mediated communication
remains important as a behavioural domain otherwise hidden from view,
which is, in Jones study, anchored, to specific places and milieus.
Gil Aboussnouga and David Machin examine British memorials from WWI
to the present relating the designs (landscapes, poses) and formal features to
ideologies of nationalism, heroism, warfare and social relations. Exploring the
changing moral and political dimensions of society through the differences in
signifiers over time, they show how social change has affected the way people
view war and its effects on memory and memorialization. In a related study,
Elana Shohamy and Shoshi Waksman examine Tel Avivs public monuments
in regard to competing narratives of migration connected to the Zionist project
and its limitations. Returning to the globalization motif, Irina Gendelman
and Giorgia Aiello study the transformation from Communism to Capitalism
in several East European cities via building facades that link post-communist
commodification to an emergent tourist industry. Similarly, Ella Chmielewska,
surveys several cities, reading the city according to dichotomies, in the
manner of Lotmans Moscow-Tartu school, an approach over half a century
old that contemporary urban semiotics has surpassed. However, her analysis
acknowledges the presence of other readings that subjectively deconstruct
her dichotomies. But, are they subjective, a semiotician would ask? Her reli-
ance on dichotomies ignores the general question of polysemy which is already
a well-established failing of this formalistic approach and to which she, like the
others, appears to be oblivious.
The editors, Thurlow and Jaworski, also include a study of their own that,
along with the chapter by Jones, is among the weakest in the collection. In
sharp contrast to their overblown claims of theoretical sophistication and
jargon-stuffed discussion, they present a subjective reading of advertisements
selling luxury, up-scale experiences. Ignoring similar and more semiotic
studies, such as Goldman and Papson (1999), they relate signs of elitism in
ads to tourism in little more than a simple content analysis. Markers of super-
elite lifestylehaute cuisine, butlers, spa treatments, luxury brandsare
identified. But what about the possibility of Baudrillard-like simulation of
the same? Just as in the case of studying local native cultures, where is their
proof of authenticity for the production of a real elite experience contained
in the commodification practices of the advertising producers? In other words,
they, themselves, take these ads for the real because they only present a
reading, rather than also interrogating their construction, costs, access and
political economy. As an exploration of elitism, limited analytical imagination
is demonstrated because of the failure to note how wealth is signified through
invidious comparison by a second process, that of excess. Thorstein Veblen
110 REVIEWS
observed this over 100 years ago; it is also exemplified by Dubai (for a semiotic
approach to this phenomenon, see Gottdiener 2011). In short, the authors
best effort does not measure up either to semiotic or to cultural studies analysis
against scholarship in these fields.
Reviewed by Mark Gottdiener
University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA
E-mail: mgott@buffalo.edu
doi:10.1093/applin/amr046 Advance Access published on 9 December 2011
REFERENCES
Goldman, R. and S. Papson. 1999. Sign Wars:
The Cultural Landscape of Capital. Guilford Press.
Gottdiener, M. 1995. Postmodern Semiotics.
Blackwell Press.
Gottdiener, M. 2011. Socio- Semiotics and the
new mega spaces of tourism: Some comments
on Las Vegas and Dubai, Semiotica 183/14,
1218.
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