I'm with her: The linguistic landscape of the women's march through the movement frame and alignment task distributions

In this study, I examine the Linguistic Landscape of the Women’s March 2017 through the discourse of the protest signs on display. The march occurred on January 21st 2017 in cities around the world to show empowerment and solidarity with women after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. As the largest protest in U.S history, it is clear protest movements are only increasing as a powerful tool used by the public to enact change, and are important resources for study. Working from the Linguistic Landscape theory by those such as Scollon and Scollon (2003), I utilise collectivist action frame theory by Snow (1992) as an analytical framework, and propose two new concepts for the investigation of social movements: The frame distribution and the alignment task distribution. I apply these concepts to a corpus of 500 transcribed protest signs from the Women’s March to answer the following questions: what frames are identified in the discourse? How are the alignment tasks split across the distribution and individual frames? What are the most distinct slogans and messages found within the corpus? The Frame Distribution showed there to be eight frames apparent in the discourse, and Women Empowerment to be the most ideationally central, followed by the Anti-Trump and the Community frame. The Alignment Task Distribution demonstrated the prognostic task to be used most, followed by the motivational and diagnostic tasks. Finally, the women empowerment frame provided the most apparent slogans, solidifying the focus of the movement to be female solidarity and support.