The analysis of shopfront signage of food and drink shops in Kowloon : a semiotic perspective

Abstract

Shopfront signage is often a combination of text and images. This dissertation examines the shopfront signage of the catering business in Kowloon, an area in Hong Kong that faces Hong Kong Island across the sea, with two particular focuses: 1) the relationships between text and images, and 2) the placement of the signage in the material world. Two specific neighbourhoods in Kowloon, namely Mong Kok and Yau Ma Tei, were selected for data collection due to their popularity among locals and tourists as shopping and dining places as well as their semiotic abundance of signage. The data analysis is structured into two parts. In the first part, the findings have shown that the shopfront signs make use of text and images to form different bimodal relationships with the aim of achieving the informational and promotional ends. The analysis has also revealed a range of strategies used by the shopfront signage for signification and advertising, such as the deployment of naturalism, engaging viewers through different types of gaze and interpersonal distance, as well as representational and compositional structures. Lastly, it has been shown that the signboards can be used to achieve indexicality. In the second part, the findings have revealed how the shopfront signage derives meanings from the material aspects of the physical world, including the use of identical letterform in decontextualized shopfront signs, exophoric and situated indexicality of the shopfront signs, the materiality of shopfront signs, layering of signs on the shopfronts, aggregation of discourses on the shopfronts, locational differences in code preference and design styles of the shopfront signs.