[Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
Eline Visser
eelienu at pm.me
Fri Mar 5 10:07:05 UTC 2021
Chiming in with Dmitry, my impression that the same goes for Dutch, I'd guess especially for generations born after 1980 or so.
"to the east of the hill" ("ten oosten van de heuvel") gets 38000 google hits, "to the right of the hill" ("rechts van de heuvel") 24000. I also know people who'd rather use left/right/top/bottom than N/E/S/W when talking about maps or from a bird's eye perspective (e.g. the Red light district is to the right of Dam Square).
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, 5 March 2021 10:18, <lingtyp-request at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
> Send Lingtyp mailing list submissions to
> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> lingtyp-request at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> lingtyp-owner at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Lingtyp digest..."
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
> (Bohnemeyer, Juergen)
>
> 2. Re: Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
> (Nicholas Evans)
>
> 3. Re: Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
> (Felicity Meakins)
>
> 4. Re: Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
> (Dmitry Nikolaev)
>
> 5. Re: Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
> (Ilana Mushin)
>
> 6. Re: Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
> (Bill Palmer)
>
> 7. Re: Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
> (Bernhard Wälchli)
>
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 05:26:07 +0000
> From: "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" jb77 at buffalo.edu
> To: LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference
> frames
> Message-ID: 258C0EB9-0002-4FB0-82EE-A714F955B191 at buffalo.edu
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Dear all — I’d like to solicit your help with a generalization. I’m wondering whether anybody is aware of a counterexample:
>
> It is well known that there are communities whose members regularly use geocentric terms in reference to the speaker’s own body, as in
>
> (1) ‘My western/downhill arm hurts’.
>
> E.g., Laughren (1978) mentions this phenomenon in reference to Warlpiri. Levinson (2003: 4) notes that the practice exists among speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (Pama-Nyungan, Queensland). Haun & Rapold (2011) present an experimental study of the practice with speakers of ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Khoekhoe, Namibia).
>
> Now, I’m interested in what you might consider something of an inverse of this kind of use: the use of relative frames at the geographic scale, as in
>
> (2) ‘The lake is to the right of the hill’
>
> My generalization is that there doesn’t seem to be any community in which the type of use exemplified by (2) is conventional.
>
> That is to say, of course we can easily imagine situations in which English speakers might exchange something like (2):
>
> - A speaker looking at the lake and hill might use (2) to describe what she sees to an interlocutor who doesn’t have visual access to the scene. The speaker might use relative language in this case in order to produce a vivid image of the scene as it presents itself to her.
> - A speaker looking at representations of the hill and lake on a map might use (2) metonymically.
>
> However, I’m unaware of a community in which something like (2) would be a conventional way of locating landscape entities with respect to one another in the absence of visual access to (representations of) them.
>
> (One could argue that (2) is pragmatically semi-infelicitous in such a context since the truth of (2) depends on the location of the observer, which is usually more variable than that of the hill and lake. However, even though the truth of (1) similarly changes with the speaker’s orientation, it is presumed to be an entrenched strategy for this context in several cultures. My interest is partly in this asymmetry.)
>
> I’m curious whether people are aware of counterexamples.
>
> Thanks! — Juergen
>
> Haun, D. M. B. & C. J. Rapold. (2011). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology 19(23): R1068-1069.
>
> Laughren,M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. in Th. Le and M. McCausland (eds.), Working papers in language and linguistics, 8: 1–16. Launceston: Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
>
> Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
>
> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours will be held by Zoom. Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu/Th 4-5pm open specifically for remote office hours.
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 06:27:03 +0000
> From: Nicholas Evans nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
> To: "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" jb77 at buffalo.edu, LINGTYP
>
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial
> reference frames
> Message-ID:
> SYYP282MB1022EEF5EF1DF2759232B91CBC969 at SYYP282MB1022.AUSP282.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="big5"
>
> I'm wondering if this is a bit of an urban myth about people saying 'my western arm hurts'. Kayardild, the absolute-reference language I've worked with most, uses cardinals all over the place, but not when talking about one's own body. I would say that in Kayardild the egocentric system hands over to the cardinal-based one at the point of considering other objects and locations. So I wonder if there's been a bit of a ramp-up in how these systems are talked about. (Of course others may have worked on languages which are more radically geocentric than Kayardild, but I'm concerned that there might be some ramping up of claims as the literature passes to secondary sources)
> Best Nick
>
> Little passage about this (from my 2010 book 'Dying Words) pasted in below
>
> The obsession with compass orientation continues through conversations, through little instructions to move a smoldering stick a little southward on the fire (perhaps an inch!), and the way you call out to an approaching unidentified person in the dark: riinmali! (“hey you approaching from the east!”). It frames people’s recollections, their dreams, even their visualizations of hypothetical scenarios. The late Dugal Goongarra, another of my Kayardild teachers, was once boasting to me about a spear he had just made, which sported a fearsome row of barbs. It would penetrate a big queenfish, he said, as far as the second barb; a turtle’s fin, as far as the fourth. And speared into a dugong, burrija bathinyinda thawurri, (“the western end (of the spear) would come out of its throat”). The spear was newly made and had not seen any action yet, so he must have been describing an imaginary scenario. But,
>
> Table 8.1 Some Kayardild compass-point derivatives, based on the root ri- (“east”)
>
> in his mind, the dugong’s throat was still clearly oriented to the compass. On the basis of this and similar interactions with Kayardild people I believe they virtu- ally never think, imagine, or even dream without orienting their mental scenes to the compass.
>
> Words for “right hand” (junku) and “left hand” (thaku) do exist. They are mainly used to locate things like a pain in the left side of your body where compass- based coding would keep shifting around. But they are never employed to locate objects or places, as we do in English with expressions like “the righthand book,” or “the path to your left.” One aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild gram- mar quite literally puts everyone in their place. Some Kayardild compass expres- sions are shown in table 8.1, which gives a set of derivatives based on ri- (“east”). Equivalent sets exist for the other three compass points.
>
> Nicholas (Nick) Evans
>
> Director, CoEDL (ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language)
> Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
> Coombs Building, Fellows Road
> CHL, CAP, Australian National University
>
> nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
>
> I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as custodians of the land on which I work, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Their custodianship that has never been ceded.
>
> From: Lingtyp lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org on behalf of Bohnemeyer, Juergen jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 4:26 PM
> To: LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> Dear all — I’d like to solicit your help with a generalization. I’m wondering whether anybody is aware of a counterexample:
>
> It is well known that there are communities whose members regularly use geocentric terms in reference to the speaker’s own body, as in
>
> (1) ‘My western/downhill arm hurts’.
>
> E.g., Laughren (1978) mentions this phenomenon in reference to Warlpiri. Levinson (2003: 4) notes that the practice exists among speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (Pama-Nyungan, Queensland). Haun & Rapold (2011) present an experimental study of the practice with speakers of ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Khoekhoe, Namibia).
>
> Now, I’m interested in what you might consider something of an inverse of this kind of use: the use of relative frames at the geographic scale, as in
>
> (2) ‘The lake is to the right of the hill’
>
> My generalization is that there doesn’t seem to be any community in which the type of use exemplified by (2) is conventional.
>
> That is to say, of course we can easily imagine situations in which English speakers might exchange something like (2):
>
> - A speaker looking at the lake and hill might use (2) to describe what she sees to an interlocutor who doesn’t have visual access to the scene. The speaker might use relative language in this case in order to produce a vivid image of the scene as it presents itself to her.
> - A speaker looking at representations of the hill and lake on a map might use (2) metonymically.
>
> However, I’m unaware of a community in which something like (2) would be a conventional way of locating landscape entities with respect to one another in the absence of visual access to (representations of) them.
>
> (One could argue that (2) is pragmatically semi-infelicitous in such a context since the truth of (2) depends on the location of the observer, which is usually more variable than that of the hill and lake. However, even though the truth of (1) similarly changes with the speaker’s orientation, it is presumed to be an entrenched strategy for this context in several cultures. My interest is partly in this asymmetry.)
>
> I’m curious whether people are aware of counterexamples.
>
> Thanks! — Juergen
>
> Haun, D. M. B. & C. J. Rapold. (2011). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology 19(23): R1068-1069.
>
> Laughren,M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. in Th. Le and M. McCausland (eds.), Working papers in language and linguistics, 8: 1–16. Launceston: Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
>
> Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
>
> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours will be held by Zoom. Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu/Th 4-5pm open specifically for remote office hours.
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
>
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20210305/73cb7610/attachment-0001.html
>
> --
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 06:38:58 +0000
> From: Felicity Meakins f.meakins at uq.edu.au
> To: Nicholas Evans nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au, "Bohnemeyer, Juergen"
>
> <jb77 at buffalo.edu>, LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial
> reference frames
> Message-ID: E266EB0A-AD42-46D6-AD76-99C8503F4868 at uq.edu.au
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> In defence of using cardinal terms for parts of the body, this is definitely the norm in Gurindji which is related to Warlpiri. The terms for ‘right hand’ and ‘left hand’ are not abstractly projected either away from the body or beyond the hand
>
> From: Lingtyp lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org on behalf of Nick Evans nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
> Date: Friday, 5 March 2021 at 4:28 pm
> To: "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" jb77 at buffalo.edu, LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> I'm wondering if this is a bit of an urban myth about people saying 'my western arm hurts'. Kayardild, the absolute-reference language I've worked with most, uses cardinals all over the place, but not when talking about one's own body. I would say that in Kayardild the egocentric system hands over to the cardinal-based one at the point of considering other objects and locations. So I wonder if there's been a bit of a ramp-up in how these systems are talked about. (Of course others may have worked on languages which are more radically geocentric than Kayardild, but I'm concerned that there might be some ramping up of claims as the literature passes to secondary sources)
> Best Nick
>
> Little passage about this (from my 2010 book 'Dying Words) pasted in below
>
> The obsession with compass orientation continues through conversations, through little instructions to move a smoldering stick a little southward on the fire (perhaps an inch!), and the way you call out to an approaching unidentified person in the dark: riinmali! (“hey you approaching from the east!”). It frames people’s recollections, their dreams, even their visualizations of hypothetical scenarios. The late Dugal Goongarra, another of my Kayardild teachers, was once boasting to me about a spear he had just made, which sported a fearsome row of barbs. It would penetrate a big queenfish, he said, as far as the second barb; a turtle’s fin, as far as the fourth. And speared into a dugong, burrija bathinyinda thawurri, (“the western end (of the spear) would come out of its throat”). The spear was newly made and had not seen any action yet, so he must have been describing an imaginary scenario. But,
>
> Table 8.1 Some Kayardild compass-point derivatives, based on the root ri- (“east”)
>
> in his mind, the dugong’s throat was still clearly oriented to the compass. On the basis of this and similar interactions with Kayardild people I believe they virtu- ally never think, imagine, or even dream without orienting their mental scenes to the compass.
>
> Words for “right hand” (junku) and “left hand” (thaku) do exist. They are mainly used to locate things like a pain in the left side of your body where compass- based coding would keep shifting around. But they are never employed to locate objects or places, as we do in English with expressions like “the righthand book,” or “the path to your left.” One aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild gram- mar quite literally puts everyone in their place. Some Kayardild compass expres- sions are shown in table 8.1, which gives a set of derivatives based on ri- (“east”). Equivalent sets exist for the other three compass points.
>
> Nicholas (Nick) Evans
>
> Director, CoEDL (ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language)
> Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
> Coombs Building, Fellows Road
> CHL, CAP, Australian National University
>
> nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
>
> I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as custodians of the land on which I work, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Their custodianship that has never been ceded.
>
> From: Lingtyp lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org on behalf of Bohnemeyer, Juergen jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 4:26 PM
> To: LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> Dear all — I’d like to solicit your help with a generalization. I’m wondering whether anybody is aware of a counterexample:
>
> It is well known that there are communities whose members regularly use geocentric terms in reference to the speaker’s own body, as in
>
> (1) ‘My western/downhill arm hurts’.
>
> E.g., Laughren (1978) mentions this phenomenon in reference to Warlpiri. Levinson (2003: 4) notes that the practice exists among speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (Pama-Nyungan, Queensland). Haun & Rapold (2011) present an experimental study of the practice with speakers of ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Khoekhoe, Namibia).
>
> Now, I’m interested in what you might consider something of an inverse of this kind of use: the use of relative frames at the geographic scale, as in
>
> (2) ‘The lake is to the right of the hill’
>
> My generalization is that there doesn’t seem to be any community in which the type of use exemplified by (2) is conventional.
>
> That is to say, of course we can easily imagine situations in which English speakers might exchange something like (2):
>
> - A speaker looking at the lake and hill might use (2) to describe what she sees to an interlocutor who doesn’t have visual access to the scene. The speaker might use relative language in this case in order to produce a vivid image of the scene as it presents itself to her.
> - A speaker looking at representations of the hill and lake on a map might use (2) metonymically.
>
> However, I’m unaware of a community in which something like (2) would be a conventional way of locating landscape entities with respect to one another in the absence of visual access to (representations of) them.
>
> (One could argue that (2) is pragmatically semi-infelicitous in such a context since the truth of (2) depends on the location of the observer, which is usually more variable than that of the hill and lake. However, even though the truth of (1) similarly changes with the speaker’s orientation, it is presumed to be an entrenched strategy for this context in several cultures. My interest is partly in this asymmetry.)
>
> I’m curious whether people are aware of counterexamples.
>
> Thanks! — Juergen
>
> Haun, D. M. B. & C. J. Rapold. (2011). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology 19(23): R1068-1069.
>
> Laughren,M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. in Th. Le and M. McCausland (eds.), Working papers in language and linguistics, 8: 1–16. Launceston: Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
>
> Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
>
> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours will be held by Zoom. Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu/Th 4-5pm open specifically for remote office hours.
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
>
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20210305/e02afc19/attachment-0001.html
>
> --
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 10:36:07 +0200
> From: Dmitry Nikolaev dsnikolaev at gmail.com
> To: LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial
> reference frames
> Message-ID:
> CAHMCzMAP9UTwH90w6z8khBpMcRq7pn8uLmZ_xxbfRKRbUnSdjg at mail.gmail.com
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Dear Juergen,
>
> I don't know what level of conventionalisation you are looking for, but
> speakers of Russian, at least those who grew up in large cities, tend in
> general to avoid using geocentric terms and feel uncomfortable using them,
> and if it is at all possible to say "The lake is to the right of the hill",
> I would personally do so. A quick googling showed that this phraseology is
> quite frequent in route descriptions, and this YouTube video literally
> advertises a plot of land "to the left of lake Veselovka".
>
> My best,
> Dmitry
>
> On Fri, 5 Mar 2021 at 07:26, Bohnemeyer, Juergen jb77 at buffalo.edu wrote:
>
> > Dear all — I’d like to solicit your help with a generalization. I’m
> > wondering whether anybody is aware of a counterexample:
> > It is well known that there are communities whose members regularly use
> > geocentric terms in reference to the speaker’s own body, as in
> > (1) ‘My western/downhill arm hurts’.
> > E.g., Laughren (1978) mentions this phenomenon in reference to Warlpiri.
> > Levinson (2003: 4) notes that the practice exists among speakers of Guugu
> > Yimithirr (Pama-Nyungan, Queensland). Haun & Rapold (2011) present an
> > experimental study of the practice with speakers of ≠Akhoe Hai||om
> > (Khoekhoe, Namibia).
> > Now, I’m interested in what you might consider something of an inverse of
> > this kind of use: the use of relative frames at the geographic scale, as in
> > (2) ‘The lake is to the right of the hill’
> > My generalization is that there doesn’t seem to be any community in which
> > the type of use exemplified by (2) is conventional.
> > That is to say, of course we can easily imagine situations in which
> > English speakers might exchange something like (2):
> >
> > - A speaker looking at the lake and hill might use (2) to describe what
> > she sees to an interlocutor who doesn’t have visual access to the scene.
> > The speaker might use relative language in this case in order to produce a
> > vivid image of the scene as it presents itself to her.
> >
> > - A speaker looking at representations of the hill and lake on a map might
> > use (2) metonymically.
> >
> >
> > However, I’m unaware of a community in which something like (2) would be a
> > conventional way of locating landscape entities with respect to one another
> > in the absence of visual access to (representations of) them.
> > (One could argue that (2) is pragmatically semi-infelicitous in such a
> > context since the truth of (2) depends on the location of the observer,
> > which is usually more variable than that of the hill and lake. However,
> > even though the truth of (1) similarly changes with the speaker’s
> > orientation, it is presumed to be an entrenched strategy for this context
> > in several cultures. My interest is partly in this asymmetry.)
> > I’m curious whether people are aware of counterexamples.
> > Thanks! — Juergen
> > Haun, D. M. B. & C. J. Rapold. (2011). Variation in memory for body
> > movements across cultures. Current Biology 19(23): R1068-1069.
> > Laughren,M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. in Th. Le and M.
> > McCausland (eds.), Working papers in language and linguistics, 8: 1–16.
> > Launceston: Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
> > Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
> > --
> > Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> > Professor, Department of Linguistics
> > University at Buffalo
> > Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> > Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> > Phone: (716) 645 0127
> > Fax: (716) 645 3825
> > Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> > Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
> > Office hours will be held by Zoom. Email me to schedule a call at any
> > time. I will in addition hold Tu/Th 4-5pm open specifically for remote
> > office hours.
> > There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> > (Leonard Cohen)
> >
> > Lingtyp mailing list
> > Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20210305/735b8d4a/attachment-0001.html
>
> --
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 08:48:25 +0000
> From: Ilana Mushin i.mushin at uq.edu.au
> To: Felicity Meakins f.meakins at uq.edu.au
> Cc: Nicholas Evans nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au, "Bohnemeyer, Juergen"
>
> <jb77 at buffalo.edu>, LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial
> reference frames
> Message-ID: 184F7CBB-F4E5-4A8F-B63D-AA0899709347 at uq.edu.au
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I’ve heard ‘There’s a mosquito on my north toe’ in Garrwa (Northern Australian), which also uses cardinal directions and upriver/downriver absolute terms widely and does not have a relative FoR system. I couldn’t say how frequently this kind of location reference is used.
>
> Ilana
>
> Associate Professor Ilana Mushin
> Reader in Linguistics
> President, Australian Linguistic Society
>
> [/var/folders/lv/m77kqy0n4x1_rcd3pk0j2n900000gq/T/com.microsoft.Outlook/WebArchiveCopyPasteTempFiles/il.pb.png]Co-Editor, Interactional Linguistics (https://benjamins.com/catalog/il)
>
> School of Languages and Cultures
> University of Queensland
> St Lucia, QLD 4072.
> Ph: (07) 3365 6810tel:(07) 3365 6810
>
> CRICOS Provider No: 00025B
>
> I acknowledge the Jagera and Turrbal peoples on whose land I live and work. Their sovereignty was never ceded.
>
> On 5 Mar 2021, at 4:40 pm, Felicity Meakins f.meakins at uq.edu.au wrote:
>
>
> In defence of using cardinal terms for parts of the body, this is definitely the norm in Gurindji which is related to Warlpiri. The terms for ‘right hand’ and ‘left hand’ are not abstractly projected either away from the body or beyond the hand
>
> From: Lingtyp lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org on behalf of Nick Evans nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
> Date: Friday, 5 March 2021 at 4:28 pm
> To: "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" jb77 at buffalo.edu, LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> I'm wondering if this is a bit of an urban myth about people saying 'my western arm hurts'. Kayardild, the absolute-reference language I've worked with most, uses cardinals all over the place, but not when talking about one's own body. I would say that in Kayardild the egocentric system hands over to the cardinal-based one at the point of considering other objects and locations. So I wonder if there's been a bit of a ramp-up in how these systems are talked about. (Of course others may have worked on languages which are more radically geocentric than Kayardild, but I'm concerned that there might be some ramping up of claims as the literature passes to secondary sources)
> Best Nick
>
> Little passage about this (from my 2010 book 'Dying Words) pasted in below
>
> The obsession with compass orientation continues through conversations, through little instructions to move a smoldering stick a little southward on the fire (perhaps an inch!), and the way you call out to an approaching unidentified person in the dark: riinmali! (“hey you approaching from the east!”). It frames people’s recollections, their dreams, even their visualizations of hypothetical scenarios. The late Dugal Goongarra, another of my Kayardild teachers, was once boasting to me about a spear he had just made, which sported a fearsome row of barbs. It would penetrate a big queenfish, he said, as far as the second barb; a turtle’s fin, as far as the fourth. And speared into a dugong, burrija bathinyinda thawurri, (“the western end (of the spear) would come out of its throat”). The spear was newly made and had not seen any action yet, so he must have been describing an imaginary scenario. But,
>
> Table 8.1 Some Kayardild compass-point derivatives, based on the root ri- (“east”)
>
> in his mind, the dugong’s throat was still clearly oriented to the compass. On the basis of this and similar interactions with Kayardild people I believe they virtu- ally never think, imagine, or even dream without orienting their mental scenes to the compass.
>
> Words for “right hand” (junku) and “left hand” (thaku) do exist. They are mainly used to locate things like a pain in the left side of your body where compass- based coding would keep shifting around. But they are never employed to locate objects or places, as we do in English with expressions like “the righthand book,” or “the path to your left.” One aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild gram- mar quite literally puts everyone in their place. Some Kayardild compass expres- sions are shown in table 8.1, which gives a set of derivatives based on ri- (“east”). Equivalent sets exist for the other three compass points.
>
> Nicholas (Nick) Evans
>
> Director, CoEDL (ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language)
> Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
> Coombs Building, Fellows Road
> CHL, CAP, Australian National University
>
> nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
>
> I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as custodians of the land on which I work, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Their custodianship that has never been ceded.
>
> From: Lingtyp lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org on behalf of Bohnemeyer, Juergen jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 4:26 PM
> To: LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> Dear all — I’d like to solicit your help with a generalization. I’m wondering whether anybody is aware of a counterexample:
>
> It is well known that there are communities whose members regularly use geocentric terms in reference to the speaker’s own body, as in
>
> (1) ‘My western/downhill arm hurts’.
>
> E.g., Laughren (1978) mentions this phenomenon in reference to Warlpiri. Levinson (2003: 4) notes that the practice exists among speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (Pama-Nyungan, Queensland). Haun & Rapold (2011) present an experimental study of the practice with speakers of ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Khoekhoe, Namibia).
>
> Now, I’m interested in what you might consider something of an inverse of this kind of use: the use of relative frames at the geographic scale, as in
>
> (2) ‘The lake is to the right of the hill’
>
> My generalization is that there doesn’t seem to be any community in which the type of use exemplified by (2) is conventional.
>
> That is to say, of course we can easily imagine situations in which English speakers might exchange something like (2):
>
> - A speaker looking at the lake and hill might use (2) to describe what she sees to an interlocutor who doesn’t have visual access to the scene. The speaker might use relative language in this case in order to produce a vivid image of the scene as it presents itself to her.
> - A speaker looking at representations of the hill and lake on a map might use (2) metonymically.
>
> However, I’m unaware of a community in which something like (2) would be a conventional way of locating landscape entities with respect to one another in the absence of visual access to (representations of) them.
>
> (One could argue that (2) is pragmatically semi-infelicitous in such a context since the truth of (2) depends on the location of the observer, which is usually more variable than that of the hill and lake. However, even though the truth of (1) similarly changes with the speaker’s orientation, it is presumed to be an entrenched strategy for this context in several cultures. My interest is partly in this asymmetry.)
>
> I’m curious whether people are aware of counterexamples.
>
> Thanks! — Juergen
>
> Haun, D. M. B. & C. J. Rapold. (2011). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology 19(23): R1068-1069.
>
> Laughren,M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. in Th. Le and M. McCausland (eds.), Working papers in language and linguistics, 8: 1–16. Launceston: Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
>
> Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
>
> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours will be held by Zoom. Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu/Th 4-5pm open specifically for remote office hours.
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
>
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20210305/3a3964b3/attachment-0001.html
>
> --
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 08:50:38 +0000
> From: Bill Palmer bill.palmer at newcastle.edu.au
> To: Felicity Meakins f.meakins at uq.edu.au,
>
> "nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au" <nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au>, "Bohnemeyer,
>
> Juergen" <jb77 at buffalo.edu>, LINGTYP
>
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial
> reference frames
> Message-ID:
> SL2PR04MB3370434D3F53D544EDC345D7C8969 at SL2PR04MB3370.apcprd04.prod.outlook.com
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi all
>
> This a really interesting question, and I’m looking forward to seeing more replies. Nick Evans I was only reading today Myers 1986 saying the Pintupi dream in cardinal orientations.
>
> Juergen, I haven’t seen any language where relative terminology for landscape features is conventionalised. However, I do encounter this in English based on a canonical perspective (e.g. ‘it’s in the dining hall no the righthand table’ – i.e. the one on your right as you enter the room).
>
> However, I have seen the occasional reference like this:
>
> “Beidahu [a ski resort in China] operates on two mountains and the valley in between. Although the maximum vertical is 900+m, generally only about 800m are open due to limited snow making on top. The front mountain features generally intermediate terrain and is served by a multi chair lift system that gives you the choice of the lower half wide open terrain or the steeper trail terrain on top. The right hand mountain features steeper terrain and is served by a single gondola that has a mid mountain station accessing the intermediate portions of the mountain.” (emphasis added). http://www.chinaskitours.com/beidahu.html
>
> Presumably this invokes a canonical perspective from the resort buildings. This text is presumably translated from Mandarin, so perhaps is transference from the original. Perhaps Sinitic languages would be a useful place to look.
>
> Best
> Bill
>
> Associate Professor Bill Palmer
> University of Newcastle
> Lead Investigator, OzSpace project
> Landscape, language and culture in Indigenous Australia.
> Vice-President, Australian Linguistics Society
>
> From: Lingtyp lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org On Behalf Of Felicity Meakins
> Sent: Friday, 5 March 2021 5:39 PM
> To: nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au; Bohnemeyer, Juergen jb77 at buffalo.edu; LINGTYP lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> In defence of using cardinal terms for parts of the body, this is definitely the norm in Gurindji which is related to Warlpiri. The terms for ‘right hand’ and ‘left hand’ are not abstractly projected either away from the body or beyond the hand
>
> From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.orgmailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Nick Evans <nicholas.evans at anu.edu.aumailto:nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au>
> Date: Friday, 5 March 2021 at 4:28 pm
> To: "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" <jb77 at buffalo.edumailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>, LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orgmailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> I'm wondering if this is a bit of an urban myth about people saying 'my western arm hurts'. Kayardild, the absolute-reference language I've worked with most, uses cardinals all over the place, but not when talking about one's own body. I would say that in Kayardild the egocentric system hands over to the cardinal-based one at the point of considering other objects and locations. So I wonder if there's been a bit of a ramp-up in how these systems are talked about. (Of course others may have worked on languages which are more radically geocentric than Kayardild, but I'm concerned that there might be some ramping up of claims as the literature passes to secondary sources)
> Best Nick
>
> Little passage about this (from my 2010 book 'Dying Words) pasted in below
>
> The obsession with compass orientation continues through conversations, through little instructions to move a smoldering stick a little southward on the fire (perhaps an inch!), and the way you call out to an approaching unidentified person in the dark: riinmali! (“hey you approaching from the east!”). It frames people’s recollections, their dreams, even their visualizations of hypothetical scenarios. The late Dugal Goongarra, another of my Kayardild teachers, was once boasting to me about a spear he had just made, which sported a fearsome row of barbs. It would penetrate a big queenfish, he said, as far as the second barb; a turtle’s fin, as far as the fourth. And speared into a dugong, burrija bathinyinda thawurri, (“the western end (of the spear) would come out of its throat”). The spear was newly made and had not seen any action yet, so he must have been describing an imaginary scenario. But,
>
> Table 8.1 Some Kayardild compass-point derivatives, based on the root ri- (“east”)
>
> in his mind, the dugong’s throat was still clearly oriented to the compass. On the basis of this and similar interactions with Kayardild people I believe they virtu- ally never think, imagine, or even dream without orienting their mental scenes to the compass.
>
> Words for “right hand” (junku) and “left hand” (thaku) do exist. They are mainly used to locate things like a pain in the left side of your body where compass- based coding would keep shifting around. But they are never employed to locate objects or places, as we do in English with expressions like “the righthand book,” or “the path to your left.” One aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild gram- mar quite literally puts everyone in their place. Some Kayardild compass expres- sions are shown in table 8.1, which gives a set of derivatives based on ri- (“east”). Equivalent sets exist for the other three compass points.
>
> Nicholas (Nick) Evans
>
> Director, CoEDL (ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language)
> Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
> Coombs Building, Fellows Road
> CHL, CAP, Australian National University
>
> nicholas.evans at anu.edu.aumailto:nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
>
> I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as custodians of the land on which I work, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Their custodianship that has never been ceded.
>
> From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.orgmailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Bohnemeyer, Juergen <jb77 at buffalo.edumailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
> Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 4:26 PM
> To: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orgmailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> Subject: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> Dear all — I’d like to solicit your help with a generalization. I’m wondering whether anybody is aware of a counterexample:
>
> It is well known that there are communities whose members regularly use geocentric terms in reference to the speaker’s own body, as in
>
> (1) ‘My western/downhill arm hurts’.
>
> E.g., Laughren (1978) mentions this phenomenon in reference to Warlpiri. Levinson (2003: 4) notes that the practice exists among speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (Pama-Nyungan, Queensland). Haun & Rapold (2011) present an experimental study of the practice with speakers of ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Khoekhoe, Namibia).
>
> Now, I’m interested in what you might consider something of an inverse of this kind of use: the use of relative frames at the geographic scale, as in
>
> (2) ‘The lake is to the right of the hill’
>
> My generalization is that there doesn’t seem to be any community in which the type of use exemplified by (2) is conventional.
>
> That is to say, of course we can easily imagine situations in which English speakers might exchange something like (2):
>
> - A speaker looking at the lake and hill might use (2) to describe what she sees to an interlocutor who doesn’t have visual access to the scene. The speaker might use relative language in this case in order to produce a vivid image of the scene as it presents itself to her.
> - A speaker looking at representations of the hill and lake on a map might use (2) metonymically.
>
> However, I’m unaware of a community in which something like (2) would be a conventional way of locating landscape entities with respect to one another in the absence of visual access to (representations of) them.
>
> (One could argue that (2) is pragmatically semi-infelicitous in such a context since the truth of (2) depends on the location of the observer, which is usually more variable than that of the hill and lake. However, even though the truth of (1) similarly changes with the speaker’s orientation, it is presumed to be an entrenched strategy for this context in several cultures. My interest is partly in this asymmetry.)
>
> I’m curious whether people are aware of counterexamples.
>
> Thanks! — Juergen
>
> Haun, D. M. B. & C. J. Rapold. (2011). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology 19(23): R1068-1069.
>
> Laughren,M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. in Th. Le and M. McCausland (eds.), Working papers in language and linguistics, 8: 1–16. Launceston: Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
>
> Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
>
> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edumailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu
>
>
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours will be held by Zoom. Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu/Th 4-5pm open specifically for remote office hours.
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orgmailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyphttp://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20210305/5c121978/attachment-0001.html
>
> --
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 09:18:27 +0000
> From: Bernhard Wälchli bernhard at ling.su.se
> To: Dmitry Nikolaev dsnikolaev at gmail.com, LINGTYP
>
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial
> reference frames
> Message-ID: 60864a60d714415e97e9e77e383a8e54 at ling.su.se
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Dear Jürgen and Dmitry,
> In some languages it is quite common to speak of “left-side” and “right-side” of rivers, which is an interesting in-between case between relative and absolute frames of reference. In fact, despite ‘left’ and ‘right’, the frame is rather absolute with rivers, whose orientation remains constant. For (Austrian) German, see for instance “Die Donau linksufrig zwischen Stromkilometer 1899,7 und 1901,9 und die „Orther Kehre“ mit Jahreskarte!” (https://www.bundesforste-fischerei.at/d/1017-donau-orth). So, as soon as you have an impressive dominant river, you can build your absolute reference system nicely with left and right.
> In Livonian, the name for Courland (Latvian Kurzeme) is kura:-mo:; mo: is ‘land’ and kura: is 'left'. The etymology of the word for Couronians is a matter of debate (as is the etymology of the Livonian word for ‘left’, which perhaps is a Baltic loan), but at least in terms of Livonian folk-etymology it is the land on the left side of the river (unclear whether the river meant is Daugava or Lielupe, both of them are quite impressive).
> In a similar sense, cardinal directions are often quite relative. In German, the Baltic Sea is Ostsee "Eastern Sea", but in Estonian it is Lääne-meri "West[GEN]-sea" (I have never managed to understand why it is Itämeri "East Sea" in Finnish).
> Best wishes,
> Bernhard
>
> From: Lingtyp lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org on behalf of Dmitry Nikolaev dsnikolaev at gmail.com
> Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 9:36:07 AM
> To: LINGTYP
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames
>
> Dear Juergen,
>
> I don't know what level of conventionalisation you are looking for, but speakers of Russian, at least those who grew up in large cities, tend in general to avoid using geocentric terms and feel uncomfortable using them, and if it is at all possible to say "The lake is to the right of the hill", I would personally do so. A quick googling showed that this phraseology is quite frequent in route descriptions, and this YouTube video literally advertises a plot of land "to the left of lake Veselovka".
>
> My best,
> Dmitry
>
> On Fri, 5 Mar 2021 at 07:26, Bohnemeyer, Juergen <jb77 at buffalo.edumailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu> wrote:
> Dear all — I’d like to solicit your help with a generalization. I’m wondering whether anybody is aware of a counterexample:
>
> It is well known that there are communities whose members regularly use geocentric terms in reference to the speaker’s own body, as in
>
> (1) ‘My western/downhill arm hurts’.
>
> E.g., Laughren (1978) mentions this phenomenon in reference to Warlpiri. Levinson (2003: 4) notes that the practice exists among speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (Pama-Nyungan, Queensland). Haun & Rapold (2011) present an experimental study of the practice with speakers of ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Khoekhoe, Namibia).
>
> Now, I’m interested in what you might consider something of an inverse of this kind of use: the use of relative frames at the geographic scale, as in
>
> (2) ‘The lake is to the right of the hill’
>
> My generalization is that there doesn’t seem to be any community in which the type of use exemplified by (2) is conventional.
>
> That is to say, of course we can easily imagine situations in which English speakers might exchange something like (2):
>
> - A speaker looking at the lake and hill might use (2) to describe what she sees to an interlocutor who doesn’t have visual access to the scene. The speaker might use relative language in this case in order to produce a vivid image of the scene as it presents itself to her.
> - A speaker looking at representations of the hill and lake on a map might use (2) metonymically.
>
> However, I’m unaware of a community in which something like (2) would be a conventional way of locating landscape entities with respect to one another in the absence of visual access to (representations of) them.
>
> (One could argue that (2) is pragmatically semi-infelicitous in such a context since the truth of (2) depends on the location of the observer, which is usually more variable than that of the hill and lake. However, even though the truth of (1) similarly changes with the speaker’s orientation, it is presumed to be an entrenched strategy for this context in several cultures. My interest is partly in this asymmetry.)
>
> I’m curious whether people are aware of counterexamples.
>
> Thanks! — Juergen
>
> Haun, D. M. B. & C. J. Rapold. (2011). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology 19(23): R1068-1069.
>
> Laughren,M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri. in Th. Le and M. McCausland (eds.), Working papers in language and linguistics, 8: 1–16. Launceston: Tasmanian College of Advanced Education.
>
> Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
>
> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edumailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu
>
>
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours will be held by Zoom. Email me to schedule a call at any time. I will in addition hold Tu/Th 4-5pm open specifically for remote office hours.
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orgmailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20210305/57d3b070/attachment.html
>
> --
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
>
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> End of Lingtyp Digest, Vol 78, Issue 4
More information about the Lingtyp
mailing list