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2013, Proceedings to the 39th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society
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15 pages
1 file
This paper presents an analysis of ‘Frames of Reference’ (FoR) in MalakMalak, an endangered non-Pama-Nyungan Northern Daly language of Australia. Studies into FoR systems provide insight into the relationship between language and cognition, and highlight how landscape features are reflected in language use and vice versa. Data collected in fieldwork settings suggest that MalakMalak uses strategies for encoding spatial relationships and settings that are intricately bound to the traditional land and its features. There are cardinal-type systems based on the directions of prevailing winds and the sun. Furthermore, the Daly River is used as a focal point in spatial descriptions. It provides a reference center from which angles of direction are projected for macro- and abstracted micro-scale descriptions in lexemes for the respective riverbanks. Generally, toponyms, landmark- as well as person-based ground-descriptions are extensively used in combination with terms of ‘orientation’ and ‘body’-parts. Furthermore, intrinsic terms are utilized on occasion, while the use of relative FoR appears to be restricted. My paper discusses MalakMalak’s FoR system in detail addressing functions and structures of the spatial system in the intricate relationship between language, culture, landscape, and cognition described by one speaker as ‘The language is like a map.’
Spatial Cognition and Computation, 2021
Australian languages are widely cited as depending overwhelmingly on abstract cardinal terms for spatial reference. However, considerable under-recognized diversity exists in Australian spatial reference, with systems invoking aspects of local topography or egocentric projections. The first step towards an empirically grounded understanding of the wider implications of Australian spatial reference systems is to establish what components of spatial systems actually occur in what combinations across the continent. This paper examines the spatial systems of five Australian Indigenous languages to test hypotheses about the role of the environment in shaping linguistic representations of space, revealing under-recognized aspects of Australian spatial systems.
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2018
Spatial Frames of Reference (FoR) have been discussed from different angles including cross-linguistic variety, detailed individual language descriptions, considering the impact of landscape and cognition, and regional overviews. Little attention, however, has been paid to their usage patterns. Consequently, this paper analyses a curious restriction on the use of different types of absolute terms. The analysis is based on a previous observation for Jaminjung that the use of absolute FoR is conditioned by whether or not the ground is overtly specified. The paper expands on this finding for two languages spoken in the same region, MalakMalak and the Roper variety of Kriol. It particularly focuses on the influence of morphosyntactic features and takes cognitive approaches as well as cultural salience into consideration.
Different aspects of Frames of Reference (FoR) have been analyzed in detail since the early 1990s. Researchers have studied cross-linguistic variety (Levinson, 1996; Levinson and Wilkins, 2006b; Pederson et al., 1998), given detailed accounts of individual languages (François, 2003; Haviland, 1993; Hoffmann, 2011; Schultze-Berndt, 2006), considered the impact of landscape and cognition on FoRs (Bohnemeyer and O’Meara, 2012; Danziger, 2010; Levinson, 2003, 2008; Palmer, 2015), and provided regional overviews (Bohnemeyer, 2013; François, 2004, 2015). Three ‘classic’ FoRs have been described, namely intrinsic, relative, and absolute (Levinson, 2003; Pederson et al., 1998). Little attention, however, has been paid to the usage patterns of these FoR. This paper describes and analyzes a curious restriction on the use of different types of absolute directionals within FoR and orientation settings in three Australian languages MalakMalak, Jaminjung, and Kriol. All three employ landmark-based `un-fixed' absolute terms based on river-flow or prevailing winds restricted to orientation settings and those where the the speaker is also the deictic center (ground) from which angles are projected. If a language also utilizes cardinal directions based on the direction of the rising and setting sun or a prominent riverbank, no such restrictions are observed. The aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, I will describe the use of Frames of Reference and Orientation in Jaminjung, MalakMalak and Kriol in detail with particular emphasis on absolute directionals. Secondly, I provide a usage-based analysis of the types of absolute FoR used in orientation and deictic as well as non-deictic FoR settings considering cognitive, morphosyntactic, semantic, and culturally specific approaches. This highlights how language-external features are reflected in language-use and vice versa.
Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 36, 26-53, 2018
This paper presents and analyses the lexical and the grammatical elements used to encode the semantic domain of landscape (the geophysical environment) in Nalik, an Austronesian language spoken in the New Ireland province of Papua New Guinea. The data discussed in the paper are primarily derived from my own fieldwork in New Ireland. The Nalik landscape lexicon is mostly formed by monomorphemic nouns; partonomies are usually derived from the semantic domain of the human body, as in vaat a daanim 'head of the river', ie. 'spring'. The conformation of the New Ireland landscape is reflected in the Nalik directional particles, which encode the position of the speaker and of the object with respect to the sea ('north-west up the coast', 'south-east down the coast', 'inland/out on the sea'). In the Nalik territory, toponyms related to human settlements are particularly dense and are often semantically transparent; toponyms referring to landscape features as hills or rivers are less dense and less prominent as reference points. The paper shows that the primary categorisation forces that drive the categorisation of landscape in Nalik are the affordances (ie. the benefits) of the landscape features and the socio-cultural practices of the community.
2019
Australian languages are widely believed to exemplify abstract spatial conceptual systems, manifest as cardinal terms. In fact, Australian languages typically make heavy use of terms invoking local environmental features. We report on research investigating correlations between linguistic spatial systems and topography, and the role of socio-cultural factors in individual variation in spatial referential strategy choices. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Information systems → Geographic information systems
MA Thesis of National Taiwan University, 2003
Spatial reference, spatial concepts, and most importantly spatial conceptualizations have attracted a flurry of research over the past two decades. Spatial language, in particular, provides researchers with an access to the inner world of spatial concepts, which are difficult to investigate by mere observation of other human behaviors. This thesis thus investigates the spatial conceptualizations in Kavalan, and the aim here is twofold. On the one hand, we conduct a detailed investigation of all linguistic means available in Kavalan recruited for spatial reference. It is found that in Kavalan each of the morphosyntatic categories that express spatial meanings has its own interaction patterns with spatial semantic categories such as Path, Region, and Direction. Moreover, what Kavalan speakers need to interpret the local role and localization in a Motion event is normally their spatial knowledge about the canonical interaction between a given pair of Figure and Ground, which helps to “simplify” the coding of linguistic forms. On the other hand, we study the structure of Motion events in narratives by looking into spontaneous speech produced by native speakers. This second perspective further divides into two dimensions. One is concerned with route knowledge as reflected in route instructions, with extra attention paid to the application of Frames of Reference (FoR). Our study shows that Kavalan speakers guide wayfinders en route by appealing largely to the Geocentric FoR (both cardinal directions and the up-down axis), though Viewpoint-centered and Object-centered FoR are also in use. This strategy is due to the nature of the geographical layout of Hsinshê Village, where the west-east axis corresponds to the land-sea and up-down axes while the north-south axis to the up-down axis. Consequently, these overlapping axes in the local environment enhance the prominent status of the Geocentric FoR in route directions. The other dimension focuses on a semantic analysis of the Frog narratives. According to our data, Kavalan must be recognized as a fairly typical verb-framed language on a par with Tagalog and Cebuano, to which Kavalan bears the strongest resemblance in the semantic typology of Motion events in the six Western Austronesian languages investigated in Huang and Tanangkingsing (2005). In addition, the most significant construction type in Kavalan is the “wiya#V” serialization, which not only describes a Figure moving progressively away from the conceptualizer, but can also depict an emerging state of affairs or a continuous activity. Interestingly, the Motion verb wi(ya) ‘leave, disappear’ shares a parallel development of grammaticalization with the Motion verb yau ‘exist, appear’ by uniting place deixis, Motion, and aspect functions, which can be ultimately attributed to the conceptual analogy between space and time.
2015
Topographic features are a special category of entities. Geographers conceptualize them as elds, that is, spatial distributions of an attribute (e.g., elevation) or, alternatively, as objects, that is, entities identi ed in space (e.g., mountains). But how do people actu- ally conceptualize landforms and does it di er across cultures? This paper examines the linguistic encoding of landforms in Lokono. Lokono landform vocabulary includes the general term horhorho ‘landform’ and a number of complex non-lexicalized phrases based on it. The language grammatically distinguishes what-nouns (nouns denoting objects) from where-nouns (nouns denoting places). By looking at landform terms through the prism of this categorization, I show that they are classi ed as a network of connected places, rather than discrete objects, and are better represented in a eld-based model. This description adds to our knowledge about the cross-linguistic encoding of topography and challenges the idea that humans conceptualize it predominantly on an object-based basis.
Language Sciences, 2008
This special issue is the outcome of collaborative work on the relationship between language and landscape, carried out in the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The contributions explore the linguistic categories of landscape terms and place names in nine genetically, typologically and geographically diverse languages, drawing on data from first-hand fieldwork. The present introductory article lays out the reasons why the domain of landscape is of central interest to the language sciences and beyond, and it outlines some of the major patterns that emerge from the cross-linguistic comparison which the papers invite. The data point to considerable variation within and across languages in how systems of landscape terms and place names are ontologised. This has important implications for practical applications from international law to modern navigation systems.
A common distinction concerning the usage of different Frames of Reference within one language is based on scale, where large-scale descriptions might utilize absolute terms, e.g. go two blocks east, then head north, but not for small-scale (table-top) descriptions, e.g. \textit{the cup is east of the saucer}. However, differences in usage within orientation (I am facing the house) and FoR settings (I am in front of the house) have, to my knowledge, not been described so far. Thus, the aim of this paper is to describe and analyze a curious restriction on the use of different types of absolute terms within FoR and orientation settings in three Australian languages MalakMalak, Jaminjung, and Kriol. All three employ landmark-based `un-fixed' absolute terms based on river-flow or prevailing winds restricted to orientation settings and those where the the speaker is also the deictic center (ground) from which angles are projected. If a language also utilizes cardinal directions based on the direction of the rising and setting sun, no such restrictions are observed. This paper thus aims to provide a thorough usage-based analysis of Frames of Reference and Orientation in two indigenous and one creole language of traditionally highly settled, non-nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.
2016
Have you ever wondered how the landscapes we live in are struc- tured linguistically? How does landscape related lexicon and gram- mar differ across languages and why? This book—a result of the collaboration between the author and the interdis- ciplinary project Language, Cognition, and Landscape at Lund University—explores these intriguing questions from a number of vantage points. It offers the reader a detailed examination of the linguistic means used to talk about landscape in Lokono—a critically endangered Arawakan language. The Lokono people live in Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana; this book fo- cuses on the Surinamese dialect. Its geographic focus in turn is the border area between the grass savanna and the rainforest riddled by a number of creeks and rivers. The book caters for the interested semantician, who will find here a compre- hensive description of the landscape-related lexicon. The comparative analysis of landscape-related grammar in turn offers insights for descriptive linguists and linguistic typologists. The book contains also an elaborate description of the Lokono grammar of space. This allows the reader to locate the landscape- domain—the realm of geographic-scale space—within the larger domain of spatial relations. Being the first detailed description of spatial relations in an Arawakan language, the book is also an invaluable source of information for linguists interested in the cross-linguistic study of the grammars of space in general. Moreover, the book is rich in cultural information pertaining to the landscape domain, offering the linguistic anthropologist a glimpse of the Loko- no subsistence practices, material culture, and traditional beliefs inextricably linked to the local landscape. Finally, the interdisciplinary setting, in which the book took its shape, renders the book appropriate for other audiences in- terested in landscape, particularly geographers and landscape ethnoecologists.
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AMS Review, 2011
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Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk, 2014
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2011
The Journal of Organic Chemistry, 2009
World Journal of Surgery, 2000
FEBS Letters, 1972
Economic Modelling, 2010
Information Visualization, 2016
International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies, 2016
Piantadosi, J., Anderssen, R.S. and Boland J. (eds) MODSIM2013, 20th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation, 2013