Public Notices as Social Commentary: An Analysis of Thematic Concerns from Linguistic Faults on Signage in Kenya

This paper examines the thematic concerns that arise from linguistic errors found in public signage. Essentially, it seeks to
analyse the veiled emerging and topical issues surrounding the author which makes him/her commit such linguistic blunders
in their signage that subsequently interfere with the entire communication process. There is some concern as to why authors
make linguistic errors in their signage; but it has not been considered from the perspective of the public signage themselves.
Therefore, this paper scrutinises the public signage in an attempt to identify some of these elusive concerns. To assist in this
analysis, the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as propounded by Halliday (1994) is applied to twenty-three public
signage collected from around the country on both on-line and off-line platform. The sampling procedure was purposefully
selected to cover various parts of the country catering for their unique people and features. It was important to select only
those public signage which contained linguistic errors which reflected emerging themes found in the society. Tabular
representation was used to portray the relationship of various components of societal commentary present in the respective
signage. The study sought to enhance specific areas of linguistics by identifying fundamental aspects therein including the
relationship between language, society and culture. Similarly, the education sector would greatly benefit by reviewing
language competence and performance tasks in students to avoid such linguistic errors in future.