Identities and ideologies on billboards in the Linguistic landscapes of Carolina, Guaynabo and San Juan, Puerto Rico

Abstract

While considering Makoni and Pennycook’s (2006) critique of the colonial nature of the notion of singular languages in this dissertation, a documentation and investigation of English and Spanish use on billboards in Carolina, Guaynabo, and San Juan, three cities in Puerto Rico, is presented. The billboards in these towns make use of Spanish, the most widely used language in Puerto Rico along with English, the second official language of Puerto Rico. From a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) perspective (Ledin & Machin, 2018; Kress, 2012), an examination of the relation between ideologies of the United States of America (US) and of Puerto Rico (PR), as evidenced in texts -written and visual- taken from these billboards, is conducted. Results are discussed in terms of social cognition and power abuse through the linguistic and photographic messages on these billboards.