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Part of
Language in Place: Stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment
Edited by Daniela Francesca Virdis, Elisabetta Zurru and Ernestine Lahey
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 37] 2021
► pp. 147–166

Chapter 8
“Boston Strong”

Place-making practices and enregisterment in the Boston Marathon discourse 2013/2014

ORCID logo | Heidelberg University |

Marathons connect both runners and onlookers to a space in unique ways and thus constitute a prime example of the reciprocal relation between language and space. This analysis draws on the Boston Marathon 2013/2014 to highlight the role of place-making practices and enregisterment connected to the world’s oldest marathon and the city it takes place in, both before and in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombings (BMB) in 2013. In line with recent sociolinguistic work on language in the urban space, this paper uses a corpus-based approach to analyse how the city is discursively created as the place of the event and, in the year after the BMB, reclaimed as a place of cheerful celebration and resilience in the wake of the incident. This study compares newspaper texts and then draws on selected semiotic artefacts that were utilized as place-making strategies in the two years analysed, thus highlighting the creative and meaning-making potential of social actors. Furthermore, the analysis discusses the role of local and supra-local social actors in the linguistic “placing of memory” (Cresswell 2004: 85) on the Boston cityscape through enregisterment before and after the BMB.

Keywords: urban space, place-making, marathon, enregisterment, corpus-based, place memory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Place-making, enregisterment, and resulting methodology
  • 3.Place-making strategies in the Boston Marathon Corpora
    • 3.1Description – content – discourse – place aboutness
    • 3.2Modality – commitment and distancing
    • 3.3Trauma and transitivity
    • 3.4Reclaiming Boston 2013 and 2014 – linguistic and social performance of belonging
  • 4.Conclusion: “Boston Strong” – short-term enregisterment as place-making
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.37.08ber
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