Linguistic Landscapes, Assemblages, and Affective Regimes in Chongqing’s Public Transport Hubs: From Transit Spaces to Meaningful Places

Abstract

This thesis examines how the linguistic landscape (LL) shapes the social functions of public transport hubs and generates patterned affective experiences in Chongqing, a megacity in Southwestern China. Responding to the largely quantitative focus of prior LL research in China, this thesis advances an interpretive and theoretical informed analysis of how signage mediates relations among people, space, affect, and mobility.

Drawing on three rounds of large-scale data collection, this thesis first maps the categories, spatial distribution, and linguistic composition of signage across six major transport modes. This quantitative overview identifies key semiotic features and notes changes in the institutional and social functions of these transport hubs. Building on this foundation, an in-depth qualitative analysis of Chongqing North High-Speed Railway Station employs Pennycook’s (2017) assemblage and Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotics framework to examine the dynamic interactions among linguistic and semiotic resources, passengers, and differentiated spatial zones.

The analysis is further extended to Jiangbei International Airport, where Wee and Goh’s (2019) concept of affective regimes is integrated with Bourdieusian notions of affect and capital to elucidate how passengers’ emotions are structured, circulated, and rendered socially productive across interconnected online and offline contexts.

Overall, this thesis demonstrates how LL transforms transport hubs from sites of transit into multifunctional and meaningful places through co-constitutive sign–people–space relations. It also shows how affect is institutionally organised and implicated in the production of social functions within regimes of mobility. Empirically, this thesis contributes a rich and systematic corpus to LL research on China and transport infrastructures; theoretically, it advances the integration of assemblage and affect in LL scholarship.