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Lamma Island (南丫島), while only a short 30-minute ferry ride from the intensely metropolitan centre of Hong Kong Island, the ‘most vertical city’ in the world, represents a rural diametric as an ‘outlying island’: lightly populated with both a long-standing local population and a transient ‘expatriate’ population. We argue that the main village Yung Shue Wan represents a ‘border nexus’ between the urban and the rural. This becomes evident through our autoethnographic linguistic landscape (LL) approach, where the four authors use four different positionalities towards understanding how displayed discourse is oriented to multiple centres of authority – that is, the municipal, regional, communal, and touristic – creating Lamma’s unique polycentric sense of place. We show that polycentricity is not only intrinsic to signs but is also contingent on those who read them. We foreground the role of autoethnographic reflexivity in LL analysis, as collaboratively studied via video conferencing tools in light of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the notion of affect, this paper offers a multimodal critical discourse analysis of health-related product advertising in Hong Kong during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advertisements were collected in the city's space of commute. We examine the construal of risk and protection in the advertisements and via their emplacement in three spatial-temporal dimensions observed in the data: the market society, the concrete public space, and the intimate familial space. Our analysis demonstrates that while risk and protection are linguistically and visually depicted to varying degrees across these dimensions, the emplacement of advertisements prompts the viewers to regard their immediate space as full of risks. As individuals encounter the advertisements, they become interpellated to see the purchase of the advertised products as necessary. Illuminating health communication during the pandemic, this study contributes to health commercialisation and responsibilisation research and provides insights into the ideological, interpersonal nature of affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article considers a form of marketing strategy among upmarket food and beverage establishments in Hong Kong and Singapore involving the use of Chinese text in their decor. Although the two cities have a majority Chinese population, English is widely considered the language of social mobility and an unmarked language in the discursive construction of eliteness. In asking, "Why Chinese?" we consider how the indexical value of a vernacular language can be rescaled in upmarket commercial spaces for an emergent group of consumers known as "cultural omnivores." Through the process of indexical selectivity, the invocation of Chinese in these establishments taps into the unique disposition of cultural omnivores by feeding their multilingual desires, and more specifically their desire to consume relatively more or less prestigious languages omnivorously in indexing social distinction. Such alternative readings of the prestige value of the vernacular by a privileged group of consumers point to the ambivalent indexicality of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]