On palimpsests and other usufructs in the linguistic landscape: interventions on previous messages

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to propose a unique category to account for a frequent, but academically neglected, kind of action in urban public space: the interventions operated on previous messages, which are usufructuary respect to them. The category of “parasitic signs” has already been proposed, to refer to advertisements and other texts located in spaces that were not specifically intended for them; we propose to use the same metaphor now for cases of “double parasitism”: the interventions that interest us not only use supports destinated to other messages, but they also use those same messages in order to build and display their own ones. We discuss the specificity of this type of performance, in comparison with others previously distinguished in studies on linguistic landscape, and we propose a classification of its recurring types of manifestation.