Abstract/Summary

The present study is a contribution to research on typographetic meaning-making and the social dimensions of typographic acts in multilingual and multiscriptural urban spaces. Writing in cityscapes materialises various types of texts and forms of discourse. The central assumption is that the form and materiality of these written texts contribute to their communicative significance. This paper is concerned with the way in which typographic resources are used to indicate discourses, index genres and become socially relevant. The research is linked to the joint project Signs of the Metropolis at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and is based on a database of 25,523 tagged and geo-referenced images. A multi-method approach has been applied between typography and sociolinguistics that introduces an analytical framework of parameters for studying the graphetics of lettering in urban space. The results from the application of the framework are presented in a foundational analysis of different discourse types (regulatory, infrastructural, commercial, transgressive, and commemorative), including a comparison of different city districts in the Ruhr Metropolis. Furthermore, it provides an analysis on decorative typefaces in Turkish language texts in shop signs in Duisburg-Marxloh; and presents results from a case study on genres, analysing the (typo)graphetic characteristics of signs in different shop types.