Typographic landscape: pragmatics of typographic variation

The present paper suggests a linguistic approach to typography which is understood as a variable communicative resource. Typography acts as one of the semiotic tools for meaning making. A person actively chooses semiotic resources that are adequate in the socio-cultural situation, interprets the meanings and coordinates their communicative competence with socio-cultural norms and traditions of communication. The methodological framework of the study is based on modern explanatory approaches to the pragmatics of meaning that have been developed in media linguistics, discourse linguistics, and is in line with a new sociolinguistic strand typographic linguistics. The typographic variations are involved in the shaping of a semiotic, typographic landscape and generate typographic meanings as a special kind of pragmatic meaning. The typographic meaning is of an indexical nature and can be studied within the framework of social indexicality in line with current approaches in sociolinguistics and metapragmatics to communicative variation. From this point of view, the issue is related to media competence and media literacy as a person’s ability to recognize and consciously apply various communicative forms and channels to express meanings in an appropriate situation. The analysis is exemplified by means of modern Russian advertising messages, street signs, announcements. Typographic meaning is created and recognized in the communicative interaction of social actors.