Linguistic and cultural landscapes in interdisciplinary interaction: modern approaches to research

Ragulina Milana Vladimirovna Doctor of Geography Leading Researcher; V. B. Sochava Institute of Geography SB RAS 664033, Russia, Irkutsk region, Irkutsk, Ulan Batorskaya str., 1 milanara@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The metaphorical field of the term "landscape" appeals to an interconnected set of phenomena and processes that form a holistic picture. Literally, in various contexts, this is the unity of the lithogenic basis, climate, soils, biota and hydrography, nature and culture; land allotment; the daily environment of a rural resident. The term has firmly established itself in physical and cultural geography, becoming the subject of research. Religious, demographic, social, urban and other "landscapes" have entered the conceptual apparatus of the relevant disciplines, bringing to them the desire to embrace complexity in statics and dynamics, imagining its "plains" and "ravines", "plateaus" and "mountain ranges". The starting point of the emergence of the concept of linguistic landscape was the focus on the external signs of the linguistic picture in society. His chronologically first and still widely cited definition emphasizes the multilingualism of the physical space: these are "posters, billboards, tables of street names... signs carrying both informative and symbolic functions" ^{[1, p. 25]}. These signs can be attributed to linguistic representations of subculture, social, ethnic community, professional group, which meets the needs of practical research (in the cited work, for example, "ethnolinguistic vitality" is studied). And almost immediately, there was a need for a more expansive interpretation, including a growing number of contexts and interdisciplinary overlaps.

As the ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity of modern society continues to grow, against the background of comparing the trajectories of linguistic and cultural landscapes, it is important to identify similarities and differences, to outline "bridges" – concepts leading to an interdisciplinary dialogue, from which both directions will benefit. The materials used in the work correspond to the problem statement and include an array of scientific literature on the problem. From a methodological point of view, we focused on the analysis of key metaphors and paradigms, assuming that in the case of landscape research, their change does not occur abruptly, with the rejection of previous views, but in the most viable option represents a cumulative build-up of the "root system" of the discipline, when part of the previous approaches or research techniques becomes an element of future developments.

Analyzing both directions, we note that modern research interests can be described by metaphors common in cultural geography and sociolinguistics: "landscape (space) is language" and "language is landscape (space). Each of them has its own preferred set of approaches, while productive and seemingly unobvious areas of overlap are emerging. Two key metaphors capture the fundamental basis of human existence. Valery Podoroga accurately expressed this: "Every thought is spatial, and not only due to the well-known features of language, but also the bodily orientation of the thinker: knowing, he activates the nearest space, endows it with spiritual intentions, projects it outside, bringing the most remote to himself. ... Insisting on the term "landscape", I only strengthen the emphasis on the existential spatiality of thought" ^{[2, p. 6]}.

Landscape as a language: approaches to cultural geography

Formulated by K. Sauer in 1925, the morphological approach inherited the ideas of the German landscape school, where its understanding prevailed as a layered sum of material components, an intermediary between human activity and the natural area. In most works of that time, it is interpreted as an orderly and harmonious combination of elements of living and inanimate nature, human culture and activity on the earth's surface, already including social relations to a certain extent ^[3]. In the first half of the 20th century, landscape research focused on the territory itself and its objects. At the same time, transformational processes and the inner worlds of their authors remained outside the scope of interests. At this time, despite the strong influence of positivism, the phenomenological paradigm in the humanities was being strengthened: the scientific, non-evaluative view of the landscape began to be replenished with existential, structuralist and semiotic perspectives. The subject field of the cultural landscape developed from the fixation, mapping and measurement of objects to the inclusion of personal experience and emotional response of the subject, which became the sphere of interest of humanistic geography. She brought the idea of the life world, a focus on everyday practices, making the individual the author and interpreter of the meanings of the cultural landscape ^[4].

Studying the life worlds and personal experience, humanist geographers posed the problem of the contribution of the cultural landscape to the formation of human identity. In general, the 1970s were characterized by a rather eclectic worldview in cultural geography. Many works on the study of the cultural landscape have been created through the synthesis of diverse philosophical, psychological, sociolinguistic and historical-literary approaches: phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, hermeneutics. As a result, the desire for an impartial description of the cultural landscape and the identification of its a priori inherent "essence" was replaced by doubt about the suitability of strict scientific methods, since the landscape should be "read", understood and interpreted as a book, following intuition and imagination.By the 1980s, with all the value of research based on the trinity of perception, understanding and behavior ^[5], it became clear that the phenomenological direction does not take into account issues of power relations, hierarchies and inequality. Neo-Marxist and postcolonial criticism, the essence of which was that humanists, concentrating on personal worlds, ignored the social facets of the cultural landscape, led to a new stage of expanding the sphere of interests and the formation of a "new" cultural geography ^[6]. This made it possible not only to detect the leading spatial processes and comprehend their emotional content, but also to recognize the "invisible" forces, power relations and capital flows that create the appearance of the inhabited space and generate its meanings. In this approach, it is necessary to "read" the landscape from the position of fluency in the languages of social power, since the spatial form of the landscape is both the result and confirmation of the society in which people live ^[7].By this time, there was a consensus that the cultural landscape is one of the metaphorical "languages" of modern society. Material objects, forms of the landscape take on encoded messages and transmit them further, creating a visually symbolic picture of values and meanings. The representation of culture is embodied in symbols and signs "appropriated" by architecture, the natural environment, and the mosaic of places, which made it possible to consider the cultural landscape as the basis for building social reality, the language of cultural processes. Since there are conventions on meanings in society, and all its members intuitively understand the language codes that make up the invisible "field" of culture, the cultural landscape acquires the property of a communicative system. Landscape can be considered as a communication system, a language where structures, objects, buildings, roads, their order, pattern play a role similar to words and phrases ^{[8, p. 29]}. Table 1 provides an idea of the diversity of trends in the new cultural geography related to textual and linguistic aspects of the cultural landscape.

Table 1.

Directions, tasks and key images of the cultural landscape in the new cultural geography

Source: ^{[3; 8]}.

The desire to synthesize the natural and cultural aspects of the landscape in the semiosphere, without resorting to the "layered" metaphor of scientism, manifested itself in the works of domestic researchers: according to V. L. Kagansky: "A cultural landscape is an earthly space, the living environment of a sufficiently large (self–preserving) group of people, if this space is both integral and structured, contains natural and cultural components, mastered utilitarily, semantically and symbolically" ^[9]. O. V. Lavrenova interprets the cultural landscape as "the process and result of endowing the surrounding world with semantic and value categories, as an ongoing process and result of semiosis, as a component of the semiosphere and a cluster of geocultural space" ^[10].

The Russian school of ethnocultural landscape studies tends to be more connected with the "land", the culture of the local community and the preservation of traditions. One of the most successful definitions, in our opinion, emphasizes "the dynamic unity of the worldview, behavior, cultural and economic strategies of the ethnic community and the geographical area that serves as the arena of their material embodiment" ^[11]. The main criteria for the allocation of regional and local ethno-cultural landscape can be attributed to: the preservation of traditional forms of architecture, planning and environmental management, the sustainability of the image of the place ^[12]. The lexico-geographical method assumes reliance on the landscape in the natural geographical sense, the multi-scale of its territorial morphological structure, which is reflected in the systems of language and toponymy ^[13]. At the same time, the semantic proximity of research on the ethnocultural landscape with a comprehensive study of real geographical objects and their linguistic dialect images within the framework of settlement systems was found ^[14]. The concept of a toponymic framework of a cultural landscape differentiated into "vertical" toponymic time layers and "horizontal" territorial information nodes can become the basis for practical application in specific ethnolinguistic landscapes ^[15].

Language as a landscape: Sociolinguistics and an interdisciplinary view

The linguistic landscape, on the one hand, addresses the study of languages from a sociolinguistic position, and on the other hand, cannot do without the representation of linguistic diversity in geographical space, which is associated with identity, cultural globalization, and the variability of the ethnic palette of the world. Initially, the intention of the study of linguistic landscapes was to "add another perspective to our knowledge of social multilingualism, focusing on language choice, language hierarchy, contact phenomena, rules and aspects of literacy ... from the point of view of applied linguistics or sociolinguistics, including the perspective of language policy" ^{[16, p.81.]}.

The interaction of linguistic anthropology, social psychology and geography gave rise to ideas that later took shape in the direction of geosemiotics ^[17]. This direction proceeds from the fact that the signs, the discourses that guide them, and specific places form a material world filled with social meanings. Decoding of these values is ensured by maintaining a double focus of attention: on sociality and materiality, which mutually condition each other. Geosemiotic linguolandscape studies are similar in the cultural landscape field. They consider the order of interaction, visual semiotic signs (signs, announcements and graffiti mentioned in the definition of a linguistic landscape), as well as the semiotics of geographically specified space – architecture and layout, the meanings assigned to places, which is expressed in the discourse of the place. Such discourses can be socio-cultural, "grown" from traditions and deep knowledge of the territory, or formed outside the local socio-cultural field. Many answers to the question: "where are the values in the stone?" ^[17], with the development of critical and political-economic theory, are placed in the plane of social interactions, class struggle, and the heterogeneous distribution of "frozen" capital in the landscape (Table 2).

Table 2.

Lines of research on the linguistic landscape

Source: ^[18;19].

In the first decade of the 21st century, the linguistic landscape was considered mainly relative to the multilingual ethnosocial space. The problem field was expanded in the direction of a multiplicity of forms of creating meaning in all types of physical, digital and sensory environments, taking into account the breadth of the spectrum of motives, attitudes and reactions to the variability of the linguistic situation. The concept of linguistic landscape has shown its productivity in pedagogy, in the virtual space of the Internet, "testing the boundaries of what is usually considered a social space" ^[20]. Just as in the case of the cultural landscape, the content of the basic subject category is reflected in the goals, objectives and methods of research, while it does not matter whether it is a scientific concept or a metaphor, for example, "reflection", "mirror" (Table 3).

Table 3.

Modern interpretations and research directions of the linguistic landscape

Source: ^[21;22].

The ethnological perspective of the study of the linguistic landscape is focused on qualitative methods: observation, interaction and clarification of the perception of geosemiotic signs make the participant of the study his co-author. Such studies have traditionally been conducted by cultural anthropologists and ethnographers in relation to indigenous peoples. The "transit" of approaches and methods of these disciplines into the field of modern multilingual spaces opens up a number of new possibilities. Sociolinguist I. Shokhami believes that the dynamic linguistic landscape, anchored in the subject environment, political, social and economic structure, has great social and research importance. "Are all these components "languages"? Is it necessary to limit the extended meaning of "language" to words? Isn't building a language when it comes to social space? Aren't movement, dance, food, and bodies languages that provide and send meanings to others?" ^{[22, p. 154]}.

As a result, linguistic landscape research goes through similar stages and faces the same challenges as cultural and landscape directions. The linguistic landscape appeals to the coordination and coherence of a variety of ethnic, political, economic, cultural, local and global processes. He is simultaneously an actor, an indicator, a communication system and a "mirror" of social reality operating in a "constellation of contexts" ^[23].

Conclusion

Since the design of the landscape concept to this day, the trajectory of the study of the cultural landscape has evolved, overcoming and including the achievements of dissimilar, polemicizing philosophical foundations, worldview paradigms, the main of which include the scientific, phenomenological (humanistic) and postmodern (accumulated heterogeneous currents), as well as systemic approaches. Studies of the linguistic landscape are almost a century "younger" than the cultural landscape, but even a brief analysis of the content reveals many similarities: from the scientific to the systemic, phenomenological (humanistic) and postmodern (neo-Marxist, critical, discursive) paradigms, there is a complication and expansion of research interests, and the subject of study is becoming more and more profound and interdisciplinary. But even at the beginning of its formation, the linguistic landscape was "conceived" as a complex and vivid conceptual formation: "... we mean a gestalt consisting of physical objects, shops, post offices, kiosks, etc., associated with colors, degrees of prominence, certain locations and, above all, written words that represent them they mark it. All these objects are marked by linguistic elements indicating what they mean ... the study of these linguistic elements, taken as a whole in a given environment, outlines an area that requires systematic research, as it can be an interesting way to reveal social realities" ^{[23, p. 8]}. The socio-philosophical currents touched upon in the work They are productive in adapting to the problems of cultural and linguistic landscapes.

Both linguistic and cultural landscapes are manifested and constructed in the life world of an individual, pass through the filters of group cultural consensuses and interpretations, have a rich object "body" of the material environment, express socio-economic and cultural-ecological systemic features. In the integral study of the cultural landscape, we noted that the object, personal, intersubjective (cultural), interobjective (systemic) domains of theoretical approaches and the problems they raise are of equal importance, none of them can be ignored if we want to get a complete picture ^[3]. Thus, scientism, phenomenology, postmodernism and systemic approaches as worldview paradigms form a consistent integrity, applied each to its own subject area. In the case of the linguistic landscape, we observe the same picture: integrity is achievable through mutually complementary development. At the same time, each of these areas of research and worldview paradigms is most productive in the context of the other three. Not struggle and displacement, but mutual complementation will be the goal of the research synthesis. This is confirmed by the latest publications: qualitative and quantitative methods, fixation of object traces of languages, deep and thoughtful interpretive work, deconstruction of spatial-linguistic text and social criticism can be productively combined in one study, which, for example, is reflected in recent reviews ^{[19; 20]}.

The "stages" of the implementation of key theoretical approaches in the study of linguistic and cultural landscapes are similar, but in the first case, the pace at which new paradigms enter the workflow is higher. Since the subject area in both directions is the landscape, the interdisciplinary interaction of concepts is "embedded" initially in the basic presuppositions of research. Two key metaphors: "language as space" and "space as language" ensure both the integration of linguistic landscape and cultural landscape directions, and contribute to clarifying disciplinary specifics. This clear understanding can help to overcome the methodological difficulties encountered in the study of ethnolocal communities, which will deepen the concept of an ethnocultural landscape.