Protest and claim in the school linguistic landscape

Abstract

These lines include the main activities carried out as members within the framework of the Regional Language Observatory research project: Language in the landscape of Mendoza schools. This research, which began in 2019, records, describes and analyzes the different linguistic expressions of the exterior and interior landscape of urban Mendoza schools.

We understand linguistic landscape (hereinafter, PL) to be any text written on streets, buildings and publicly accessible sites such as billboards, advertisements, graffitis, among others, and that manifest a special use of language linked to social, informative and symbolic functions. It is a marker of the power and status of the linguistic communities that inhabit a territory (Laundry and Bourhis: 1997).

The analysis carried out on the PL of the Teaching Application Department, UNCuyo (hereinafter DAD) conforms to the theoretical and methodological guidelines proposed by various authors, such as Rodrigue Landry and Richard Bourhis (1997), Muñoz Carrobles (2010), Pons Rodríguez (2012), Mónica Castillo Lluch and Daniel Sáez Rivera (2013). This analysis is also enriched with knowledge of cognitive linguistics.

This research is exploratory. The corpus is made up of photos of posters, signs, graffiti, writings on exterior and interior walls of the DAD produced in September 2021, as a consequence of a conflictive situation that arose in the Institution and that had a strong impact on the entire educational community of the school. The unit of analysis considered is the microdiscourse, a unit of the language in use put into use in effective communication situations.

We can affirm that there is always PL and that it is changing and responds to the needs of the speakers and specific communicative situations. In this way, it is observed that the PL is a framework that is modified according to the concerns, needs, interests, emotions and thoughts of the communities that contain it. We conclude that in the external and internal PL of the DAD, a marked freedom of expression of adolescents is manifested and the way in which it is made visible.