ABSTRACT
This study examines the pragmatic act and meanings of Linguistic Landscapes to derive the author’s communicative intention and effects, whether they are to warn, ensure safety, prohibit, etc. Linguistic landscapes are symbolically constructed with objects and linguistic tokens to display relative salience of materials and objects in the public apace. This study, thus, demonstrates that the linguistic tokens found in the visual representations of linguistic landscapes are influenced by context and figures in deriving pragmatic acts.
The study adopts the ethnographic approach to linguistic landscape study and the socio-cultural interactional theory of Pragmatic Acts by Jacob Mey to examine how linguistic tokens and by extension linguistic landscapes interact with context, the linguistic choices that adapts to the situation, and the constraints and affordances that the context permits, to produce pragmatic acts which are in turn the communicative intention and effect proposed by the authors of the sign. The study analyses twelve (12) linguistic landscape data accompanied with interviews conducted on the perceptions of passersby selected through a homogenous purposeful sampling technique.
The pragmatic acts of informing and advising, regulating and safeguarding, and persuading and threatening reveal themselves as communicative intensions in selected linguistic landscapes in Benin City. This study, therefore, claims that to every linguistic landscape there is a function and communicative intention proposed, be it to inform and advise, regulate, and persuade. It upholds the claim of the theory of pragmatic acts to analyse and examine linguistic expressions from outside in, that is, from the environment and argues that the environment of linguistic tokens/expressions provides the constraints which in turn reveal the possibilities afforded the linguistic token.
