The grapheme and symbol x has been documented as relatively indeterminate and polysemic (e.g.
Gale, 2015). Yet, various typographic, orthographic and other design choices make
it particularly salient in the contemporary semiotic landscape. The paper starts by outlining briefly the history of the changing
uses and associations of x in different areas of social life. This is followed by discussion of the typographic
and orthographic salience of x, emphasizing its unique, unsettling, and ‘foreignizing’ effect on displayed
language. The paper concludes by linking the salience of x with a global verbal-visual register that I have
called ‘globalese’ (Jaworski, 2015a), and by briefly pointing to its origins in the
typographic experiments of avant-garde art.
1996Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barthes, R.
1977Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana.
Barthes, R.
1997 [1979]The Eiffel Tower. In The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (pp. 3–16). Translated by R. Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chmielewska, E.
2010Semiosis takes place or radical uses of quaint theories. In A. Jaworski & C. Thurlow (Eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Text, Image, Space (pp. 274–291). London: Continuum.
Coupland, N.
2012Bilingualism on display: The framing of Welsh and English in Welsh public spaces. Language in Society, 411: 1–27.
Danesi, M.
2009X-Rated! The Power of Mythical Symbolism in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Danesi, M.
2017The Semiotics of Emoji. London: Bloomsbury.
Dreyfuss, H.
1984Symbol Sourcebook. An Authoritative Guide To International Graphic Symbols. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Dürscheid, C. & Siever, C. M.
2017Jenseits des Alphabets – Kommunikation mit Emojis. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik, 45(2): 256–285.
Drucker, J.
1994The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Drucker, J.
1995The Alphabetic Labyrinth. The Letters in History and Imagination. London: Thames & Hudson.
Firmage, R. A.
1994The Alphabet Abecedarium: Some Notes on Letters. Boston, MA: David R. Godine.
Frutiger, A.
1998 [1978/1979]Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning. Translated by Andrew Bluhm. London: Ebury Press.
Gale, C.
2015A practice-based evaluation of ambiguity in graphic design, embodied in the multiplicities of X. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Brighton.
Guth, C. M. E.
2012The local and the global: Hokusai’s Great Wave in contemporary product design. Design Issues, 28(2): 16–29.
Hall, K.
2007X (rated). In F. Malti-Douglas (ed.). Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference. 1561–1562.
Heller, M. & McElhinny, B.
2017Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Hermeren, G.
1969Representation and Meaning in the Visual Arts. Lund: Scandinavian University Books.
Hochschild, A. R.
1983The Managed Heart. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
Jaffe, A.
2009Entextualization, mediatization and authentication: Orthographic choice in media transcripts. Text & Talk, 9(5): 571–594.
Järlehed, J. & Moriarty, M.
2018Culture and class in a glass: Scaling the semiofoodscape. Language & Communication, 621: 26–38.
Jaworski, A.
2015aGlobalese: A new visual-linguistic register. Social Semiotics, 25(2): 217–235.
2016Faces, gestures, poses: Commodification of non-verbal behaviour in contemporary consumer culture. Keynote paper presented at the 37th International LAUD Symposium, ‘Linguistic Landscapes and Superdiversity in the City’, University of Koblenz-Landau, 4–6 April 2016.
Jaworski, A.
in press. Writing as assemblage: Multilingualism, multimodality and materiality. International Journal of Multilingualism.
Jaworski, A.
forthc. ‘Smile!’: Happiness and affective labour in contemporary semiotic landscape.
2019bArtificial language and visions of hope. Paper presented at the HKU Colloquium on ‘Sociolinguistics and the Humanities’, University of Hong Kong 26March 2019.
Ledin, P. & Machin, D.
2018Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to Practice. London: Sage.
Lee, C.
2015Digital discourse@public space: Flows of language online and offline. In Rodney Jones, Alice Chik and Christof Hafner (Eds.), Discourse and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age. London: Routledge.
Paul, A.
2014From stasis to ékstasis: Four types of chiasmus. In Boris Wiseman & Anthony (Eds.), Chiasmus and Culture (pp. 19–44). New York: Berghahn.
Paul, A. & Wiseman, B.
2014Introduction. In Boris Wiseman & Anthony (Eds.), Chiasmus and Culture (pp. 1–16). New York: Berghahn.
Pelkey, J.
2017The Semiotics of X: Chiasmus, Cognition, and Extreme Body Memory. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Porębski, M.
1972Ikonosfera. Warszawa: PWN.
Roy, M.
2001Sign After the X. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Sacks, D.
2003The Alphabet. London: Hutchinson.
Sacks, D.
2010Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S.
2003Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge.
Thurlow, C.
forthc. When globalese meets localese: Transformational tactics in/of the global semioscape – A Bernese case study. Social Semiotics.
Thurlow, C. & Aiello, G.
2007National pride, global capital: A social semiotic analysis of trnasnational visual branding in the airline industry. Visual Communication, 6(3): 305–344.
Thurlow, C. & Moshin, J.
2018What the f#@$!: Policing and performing the unmentionable in the news. In M. Schröter and C. Taylor (Eds.), Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse (pp. 305–328). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Van Leeuwen, T.
2001Semiotics and iconography. In T. van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of Visual Analysis (pp. 92–118). London: Sage.
Van Leeuwen, T.
2005Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge.
2021. When globalese meets localese: transformational tactics in the typographic landscape – a Bernese case study. Social Semiotics 31:1 ► pp. 88 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.