Exploring Linguistic Aspects in Iranians’ Graffiti

Abstract

There is a great range of graffiti created with variety of intentions and purposes. Graffiti as a significant linguistic event have been viewed as a source of data including linguistic studies of discourse patterns and grammar which have attracted a number linguistics researchers’ attention. The study is based on the hypothesis that graffiti, as a linguistic landscape, use specific features of language and seeks to gain an insight into linguistic peculiarities involved into graffiti writing. The data for this article consisted of two hundred written documentations in the context of Iran. In order to determine how many of gleaned data entail the linguistic peculiarities and specify the number of each peculiarity, the researcher has applied Hall’s (1980) fifteen processes in defining linguistic features on graffiti. The results revealed abundant linguistic aspects in the collected graffiti. Findings of the present study showed that linguistic features existed in 78 graffiti and in 3 cases, two linguistic features of graffiti were found. Among all graffiti entailing linguistic features, dialogues were the most frequent linguistic peculiarity involved into graffiti writing and punning on re-division of words and implication of questions with no legitimate answers are the least frequent ones.