Toward an ethnographic materialist semiotics: spatial scope, indexicality, and chronotope in a Chinese academic institution

Abstract

Jan Blommaert had a profound impact on studies of language in society, pushing many concepts, theories, and research approaches to the center of sociolinguistics. Materialist semiotics is one of the theories and research approaches that he argued for forcefully. Blommaert’s approach to semiotics aligns with Kress’s social semiotics and Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotics, with an emphasis on the social and materialist nature of signs. By theorizing materialist semiotics, Blommaert argued against the traditional abstract view, which saw meaning systems as timeless and context-less. This paper discusses three core elements of materialist semiotics – spatial scope, orders of indexicalities, and chronotopicity – and presents an ethnographic landscaping case study of a Chinese university’s on-campus bilingual signage, in order to illustrate materialist semiotics and to attract more scholarly attention to Blommaert’s oeuvre, which offers a wealth of theoretical and empirical potential, and continues to inspire us to do more, to go further.