Abstract
This chapter investigates the relationship between written texts and space. It asks how the spatial surroundings of texts can become relevant for their interpretation and how, in turn, texts can contribute to the construction of the space they are in. We provide a comprehensive overview of previous research on the relationship between texts and space from research areas such as multimodal text linguistics, geosemiotics, and linguistic landscape research. In particular, we introduce the various formal and functional categories that have been proposed to describe the relationship between texts and space. In addition, we provide a case study of texts in a science center which demonstrates that the study of both individual texts and “ensembles” of texts can yield more detailed results if we go beyond the mere classification of the text-space relationship and ask how exactly a text signals the relevance of a particular space for its interpretation or how the meaning of a space is shaped by the texts in it. In particular, we suggest that the communicative function of the texts at the science center does not exhaust itself in a specific mental response as a reaction to reading a particular text, but rather that the texts are geared towards inducing physical actions from their readers that go far beyond the act of reading. Consequently, the science center and its texts provide a perspicuous setting for exploring the pragmatics of written texts in space.
Kesselheim, Wolfgang