Contest “Gorod bez oshibok” (“Error free city”): About the speech culture of a big city

Abstract

The article analyzes the linguistic material obtained as a result of the 2023 “Error free city” contest initiated by philologists of the Ural Federal University. The contest fits into the circle of studies devoted to the interpretation of regional/urban identity as a phenomenon that has a mental and semiotic nature. The local text, whose multidimensional nature is an iconic feature of this object, allows us to address the examination of the visual aspects of the urban environment, the assessment of the ecological component of urban texts of the city. The analysis of the material is based on the concept of speech culture, which has been developed with the invaluable contribution of Saratov linguists. Territorial community acquires behavioral features in the course of its development. The activity of a person in relation to urban texts forms this person as a culturally organized subject and is considered from the perspective of his cultural and communicative activity. The corpus of collected material contains 300 photo-facts, fixing a speech error chronologically and locally. The negative linguistic material obtained as a result of the event allow s the linguist to diagnose the speech competence of a modern urban speaker. When analyzing the collected units, the frequency of a certain type of error was taken into account, as well as the status of the written urban text: a professionally prepared urban text (advertisement, store sign, banner, etc.) or handwritten and printed products (leaflets, price tags, announcements) that fi ll the urban space for a short time and are quickly replaced. Spelling and punctuation errors prevailed in terms of frequency. Violation of stylistic register was noted in advertising texts.

Keywords

• regional identity
• local text
• contest
• speech culture
• speech error
• spelling error
• punctuation error
• stylistic irrelevance