Locating signs of the street
Locating signs identify the street and its buildings, verbalising the space delineated by architecture. They are labels for specific places, stating the name of of a building or street. They are totally indexical to a place and are meaningless away from it. Some like brassplates for businesses are legal requirements. The owners can actually change the text with difficulty. Readership is passers-by, drivers, postal workers etc – anyone who needs to know the precise identity of a particular spot.
Locating signs identify the street and its buildings indexically, called by Scollon & Scollon (2003, p.146) ‘situated semiotics ... any aspect of the meaning that is predicated on the placement of the sign in the material world.’ The meanings of locating signs are false if they are moved to a different location. Austin (1962) laid down felicity conditions for performative utterances such as the speaker having the right role. The felicity conditions for locating signs require not only the right licensor and owner but also the right location. Some signs, like brassplates for businesses, have to be displayed by law in the Companies Regulations (2008). Their readership is passers-by, drivers, postal workers etc – anyone who needs to know the precise identity of a particular spot. <Percy House> is a locating sign , giving nothing but the name, indexical to the building it appears on, lowercase. Scollon and Scollon (2003, p.153) see this as exophoric reference in which language refers to a particular visible physical object. <LEAZES PARK ROAD> is a typical modern English street sign, with raised capital letters; the physical object to which it refers is then the entire street, presumably extending to the point where a different street-name sign is placed.