Exploring ‘psychoscapes’

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of psychoscapes into Linguistic Landscape studies, extending its analytical scope to the socio-cognitive and discursive construction of urban space. Integrating Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS) with Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), the study examines representations of two contrasting Johannesburg districts, Hillbrow and Sandton, in a 141-million-word corpus of South African broadsheet newspapers. Through collocation analysis, semantic framing, conceptual blending, and perspectivisation, it shows how Hillbrow is constructed through discourses of crime, decay, and precarity, while Sandton is associated with wealth, consumption, and corporate power. These representations reproduce ideological spatial imaginaries and socio-economic inequalities. The article argues that discourse plays a constitutive role in shaping psychoscapes, socially shared, affectively charged mental representations of place that mediate perception and action. It proposes a triangulated framework for analysing urban space as simultaneously cognitive, semiotic, and material.