Public Notices as Social Commentary: An Analysis of Thematic Concerns from Linguistic Faults on Signage in Kenya
Year: 2026
Type: editorial
Abstract: This paper examines the thematic concerns that arise from linguistic errors found in public signage. Essentially, it seeks toanalyse the veiled emerging and topical issues surrounding the author which makes him/her commit such linguistic blundersin their signage that subsequently interfere with the entire communication process. There is some concern as to why authorsmake linguistic errors in their signage; but it has not been considered from the perspective of the public signage themselves.Therefore, this paper scrutinises the public signage in an attempt to identify some of these elusive concerns. To assist in thisanalysis, the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as propounded by Halliday (1994) is applied to twenty-three publicsignage collected from around the country on both on-line and off-line platform. The sampling procedure was purposefullyselected to cover various parts of the country catering for their unique people and features. It was important to select onlythose public signage which contained linguistic errors which reflected emerging themes found in the society. Tabularrepresentation was used to portray the relationship of various components of societal commentary present in the respectivesignage. The study sought to enhance specific areas of linguistics by identifying fundamental aspects therein including therelationship between language, society and culture. Similarly, the education sector would greatly benefit by reviewinglanguage competence and performance tasks in students to avoid such linguistic errors in future.
Author: Maina, D. Macharia
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7133937601