SU's Pandey Is Featured Presenter in Georgetown Linguistic Series

SALISBURY, MD---Dr. Anjali Pandey, professor of Applied Linguistics at Salisbury University, recently was a featured presenter in the fall speaker series hosted by Georgetown University’s Linguistics Department.

Her presentation, “When Size Matters: Multimodality, Material Ethnography and Signage in Trump’s Race to the White House,” is part of a recent study appearing in the latest issue of the journal Linguistic Landscape Research.

In her talk, Pandey discussed how the study used frameworks in emerging linguistic landscape research to analyze the 2016 race to the White House. One area of focus was how the Trump campaign utilized the power and potency of the 200-year-old tradition of American yard signage, and its semasiography to increase the size of its political tent.

Pandey’s presentation examined how, in this signage particularly, the linking of political history, name recognition and a tagline with allusion to American largesse bore unprecedented results.

“Zooming in on sign wars in one rural neighborhood, the paper examined how the in-built dialogicity of witnessed campaign yard signage succeeded in triggering contagious and conspicuous acts of affective stance-taking, particularly in neighborhoods of geospatial contiguity across the nation,” said Pandey. “The strategic deployment of unorthodox messaging particularly for rural voters bore unanticipated political outcomes.”

A multimodal analysis of Trump’s signage in her research revealed a semiotascape with singular appeal to the trope of bigness, she added.

The paper concluded by examining how effective frameworks in current linguistic landscape analysis may be in comprehending what makes winning signage and the importance and staying power of visible signage in current trending toward more ephemeral and digitized forms of campaigning.

For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU website at www.salisbury.edu.