This paper explores two prominent strands of inquiry within new materialism -- Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage thinking and Karen Barad's agential realism -- and situates them in relation to language studies. While a singular definition of new materialist scholarship is not feasible, we argue that the selected approaches have potential to come…

Taking a multi-level perspective on language-in-public-space policy, this study investigates the way Tunisia's dominant languages are dealt with in three independent but interrelated activities of language policy: official texts, public talk, and the actual practices of business actors in five commercial districts in metropolitan Tunis. Detailed…

The field of linguistic landscape has rarely engaged with the growing number of metrolingual practices brought about by online digital spaces. This paper examines the online linguistic landscape of social media platforms, which presents a spatial repertoire of innovative semiotic affordances. Adopting an online ethnographic approach consisting of…

This article engages with the theme of the proposed special issue in a perhaps unexpected way: for me, the 'translinguistic movement' is a pertinent reminder to move beyond the boundaries of language and other visible/audible modalities that are involved in semiosis. It also encourages us to move beyond the naïve empiricism that has shaped…

In the current revival of Gumperz' notion of the "verbal repertoire," which today is rather termed as communicative or semiotic repertoire, some scholars tend to locate repertoires with individual speakers whereas others see them primarily as emerging from particular spatial arrangements. What is often underestimated in both approaches…

The dominant analytical approaches to Lingua Franca English interactions are largely influenced by a structuralist orientation that prioritizes verbal resources in localized face-to-face contexts. This article argues that recent developments in globalization, mobility, and digital communication call for a more complex orientation to the focus and…

Although people may readily refer to Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. as Anglophone countries, recent demographic and sociolinguistic profiles of these countries indicate that they are actually both Anglophone and multilingual, and in some of their cities, even more multilingual than Anglophone. Recent research also indicates…

CLIL focuses on the integration of content learning and additional language learning. However, it is increasingly recognized that the re/presentation and communication of discipline-specific content involve not only language, but also other semiotic modes (such as visuals and gestures). This is accelerated by the advancement of digital…

The way in which the count/mass distinction (CMD) is realized in English can cause serious problems for learners. Cognitive theories of language propose that it is based on the speaker's conceptualization of the world. It has also been argued that this conceptualization is socially constructed, as social semiotic resources influence what a speaker…

This article reports communicative interactions with a focus on the body as a dimension of the semiotic repertoire. The research context is a four-year, multi-site linguistic ethnography which investigates how people communicate in superdiverse cities in the UK. In the setting of a butcher's stall in a city market we consider three interactions at…

This chapter explores how systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can contribute to secondary teachers' effectiveness for teaching disciplinary literacies to refugee youth in the United States. The chapter describes the Milltown Multimodal/Multiliteracies (MMM) Collaborative, an SFL-based professional development partnership between a large public…