A Contrastive Study of Static and Dynamic State of Expressing in English and Chinese Language Landscapes

With the rise of the study of language landscape, the study of language ontology on linguistic signs has been more and more flourishing. Static and dynamic are a pair of concepts that are often mentioned when people talk about the differences between English and Chinese. This study takes the campus language landscape of Shandong University (Weihai campus) and Manchester University as the corpus, and divides the collected corpus into four categories: slogan, sign, introduction and notice, to explore the static and dynamic state of expressing in English and Chinese language. This study finds that, in general, the dynamic advantage of Chinese is very obvious, only in the prompt sign type, Chinese text has a less dynamic advantage; in contrast, English text does not have a static advantage in general, but only in prompt signage type text.