Landscape and Culture – Cross-linguistic Perspectives

Language Sciences, 2008

Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2012

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.

Springer eBooks, 2003

Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, 2010

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.

Book chapter in: 'The Semantics of Nouns' (edited by Zhengdao Ye, OUP), 2017

This chapter examines the semantics of selected words for standing-water places in English, French, and the Australian Aboriginal language Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. It uses standing-water places as a case study to argue that languages and cultures categorize the geographic environment in diverse ways, influenced by both geography and a culture’s way of life. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) technique of linguistic analysis is used to present semantic explications of the nouns. Furthermore, the chapter investigates the semantic nature of nouns for kinds of places, and shows how to approach the treatment of nouns for landscape within the NSM framework. The chapter finds that the meanings of landscape concepts, like those of other concepts based in the concrete world, are anchored in a human-centred perspective.

2011

I make the case for ontology of landscape in language, addressing a series of concerns that are hindering a broader take-up of ontology as a tool for intra-and cross-linguistic research. The bottom line of my argument is that ontologies, as formal specifications of vocabularies, address a core need of language studies and that the complications arising from different philosophical views on ontology are largely irrelevant for the practical task of studying landscape in language.

2018

This study examines the contrastive lexical semantics of a selection of landscape terms in English and the Australian Aboriginal language, Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. It argues that languages and cultures categorize the geographical environment in diverse ways. Common elements of classification are found across the languages, but it is argued that different priorities are given to these factors. Moreover, the study finds that there are language-specific aspects of the landscape terms, often motivated by culture and land use. Notably, this study presents ethnogeographical concepts as being anchored in an anthropocentric perspective, based on human vision and experience in space. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) technique of semantic analysis is used throughout, and it is argued that this methodology provides an effective tool in the exploration of ethnogeographical categories.