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Plurilingual posters in a multilingual city: reader positioning and power negotiation

ABSTRACT Through the study of plurilingual posters for pop concerts, musical performances, sports events and other cultural and entertainment events, this paper investigates language status and functions, motivations of linguistic choices, discourse practice and social practice in three distinct institutional contexts, and takes the multilingual Chinese society of Macao as a case study. The distribution and representation of languages in posters show the shifting power relations and display the reader positioning in situations of language contact between Traditional Chinese characters, Simplified Chinese characters, Portuguese, English, and written Cantonese. This paper draws on critical discourse analysis to study the realization of commercial, governmental and civic power through a diverse and plurilingual discourse genre. It shows that although governmental authority is still invested in the colonial language of Portuguese, it is not immune from the marketization associated with the language of commercial capital, English. The analysis also indicates that the plurilingualism evoked by governmental authority situates monolingual readers in formal and respectful positions with respect to other languages, commercial ventures seek to earn money by entertaining readers less formally, and civic associations cultivate their readership in flexible ways in accordance with the target sector of the community.