The linguistic landscapes of nature trails: creating presence, marking absence, shaping meaning

Physical landscapes are often designated and given meaning through linguistic landscapes, markers, street signs and placards. While these are ubiquitous in urban areas, within the natural environment, linguistic landscapes serve to designate parts of nature, give significance, and educate. The dynamic, changeable character of nature means there is not always congruence between the linguistic landscapes and the elements of nature these designate. This is particularly the case with marked, didactic, nature trails. In this paper, we interrogate linguistic landscapes as indices that point to absent objects in nature as an act to communicate the trail to visitors and cultivate an understanding of some parts of nature that are not always visible to humans. Using theoretical concepts of the index from Peirce and the notion of différance from Derrida, we explore the inter-connectivity between linguistic landscapes and absent nature elements. Through deconstruction, we explore the boundaries between nature and culture to highlight the circulation of meaning in and out of the linguistic landscape and in and out of the natural landscape in an ongoing representation-in-relation. We situate our theoretical research in two physical places, an interpretive path in the Tampa Mountain in Brasov, Romania, and a nature walk in the middle of Lincoln Park, Chicago, USA.