Top-Down Governance and Bottom-Up Practices in a Tourism Linguistic Landscape: A Geosemiotic Study of Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall

Abstract

Tourism linguistic landscape research has documented multilingual visibility extensively, but less attention has been paid to how sign authorship is associated with the organization and functional distribution of linguistic resources within the same tourism space. This study examines 846 publicly visible signs collected at Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall to compare top-down and bottom-up signage in terms of language repertoire, spatial arrangement, multilingual information relations, code priority, script form, and Chinese linguistic variants. Quantitative comparisons were combined with geosemiotically informed interpretation of selected signs. The results show a strongly Chinese-centred landscape with marked differences between the two actor groups. Top-down signs displayed broader multilingual repertoires, highly regular spatial arrangements, and predominantly duplicating information across languages, whereas bottom-up signs used fewer languages on average but showed greater variation in information distribution, visual priority, spatial organization, and localized linguistic forms. The strongest associations concerned language repertoire, while script form showed no reliable authorship difference. A signboard-only sensitivity analysis substantially reduced several full-corpus contrasts, indicating that authorship and sign function are closely intertwined. Functionally, the findings distinguish multilingual availability from information equivalence: displaying more languages does not necessarily entail more differentiated information. Symbolically, Chinese retained a stable visual centre, while English prominence, Tang-related references, and dialectal expressions provided more selective resources for global, historical, and local positioning. The study proposes an actor–configuration–function account of tourism linguistic landscapes that connects authorship with observable sign organization while avoiding causal interpretations of actor categories.