Kurztexte im öffentlichen Raum in Frankreich – Diskurse zu Sauberkeit, Sicherheit und zur (kulturellen) Partizipation
Short Texts in the Public Sphere in France – Examples of the Discourse Concerning Cleanliness, Security and (Cultural) Participation

Summary/Abstract: Short texts, either of formal or of informal nature concerning the text producers, are ubiquitous in the public sphere. Concerning the text functions as well as the form of the texts, researchers are confronted with a large variety of illocutionary goals and formal strategies. The description of written and, often, multimodal texts in the public sphere is anchored in the discipline of Linguistic Landscapes. In oder to investigate the principles of the discourse realized by short texts in the public sphere, the present article analyzes official, multimodal short texts that have been published in fall 2019 in public transport, near train stations and in universities in Paris, France. The analysis of the texts who can be mainly considered as part of a discourse of cleanliness focusses on the interconnection of different semiotic ressources and on the specific communicative functions of the texts. After the conceptual definition of the study’s underlying concepts of “public space” and “dispositives” as well as a closer look at the specific reception conditions of short texts in the public space follows the discussion of characteristics of short texts with regard to the corpus. Afterwards, we will present selected examples and discuss their formal design as well as their communicative functions. The analysis shows a wide range in terms of the functional orientation of the short texts examined. It becomes clear that different illocutions are realized in the public space; the corpus contains calls to action, prohibitions and offers for orientation, but also texts aiming at motivation the addressees to participate actively on the cultural level or for generating cognitive pleasure during the process of decoding through cultural references and/or puns. The degree of interaction with the potential recipients also varies. The corpus analysis shows that the combination of the semiotic resources in the conception of the overall message in the documents can be designed in completely different ways. As a consequence, we observe a different degree of multimodal linking on a formal and functional level as well as variances in the connection patterns. All examples make clear that an adequate decoding of the short texts would not be possible without considering the integration of the texts in a specific local context, containing as well objects in the vicinity of the texts.

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