Using the key concept of sociolinguistic scales, this article examines the scaling of commemoration of the deceased through the linguistic landscape (LL) of a state-owned cemetery in Beijing, China. As one of China’s oldest modern cemeteries, it has become the final resting place for numerous social celebrities. While cemetery LLs have received growing scholarly attention, the scaling of commemoration and the construction of posthumous identities through gravestone semiotics remain under-explored, particularly in the Chinese context, where state-market dynamics shape memorial practices. Through analysing linguistic features of gravestones and public signs, this study identifies two distinct modes indexing the ordinariness or famousness of the deceased, respectively. Specifically, ordinariness is associated with family matters, while famousness is linked to societal contributions through one’s occupation. This familial-social dichotomy indexes the deceased from various social backgrounds as either public or private figures, scaling their commemoration accordingly. The findings reveal that the ordinariness/famousness dichotomy serves as a resource for scale-making used for commodification, projected by the ideology of public/private and rendering the sociolinguistic scale relative scope of productivity. By theorising the ordinariness/famousness dichotomy as a scale-making resource, this research extends LL scholarship on memorialisation beyond public monuments to commercial cemeteries, offering a scalable framework for understanding how differential commemorative legitimacy is discursively constructed and commodified.
Chengzhu Yin (Tue,) studied this question.