This project examined the linguistic landscape to learn more about societal 'big-D' Discourse. The linguistic landscape is all of the visual language in a public location. Most past research has been done in multilingual contexts in urban areas. 

We were looking at a gap in the research: monolingual English communities. We explored this gap by studying discourse about pets. We hoped to discover more about how English users regard pets in societal Discourse.

The data we collected were digital photos of written pet discourse we found in the everyday environment. Bumper stickers, mugs, t-shirts, signs -- anything we found with pet discourse we used in our data.

For this project, we collected data from both the USA and UK.

Once we had collected over 600 tokens, we realized we could do some interesting quantitative analysis (Discourse Analysis is primarily a qualitative discipline). We were able to find several comparative patterns between the USA and UK data and present them in a conference paper. The graph to the left illustrates the novel 'pet parent' relationship in the USA, compared with the non-existent 'parent' relationship in the UK!