[Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames

Fri Mar 5 20:54:13 UTC 2021

Dear all — Wow, many thanks to everyone who has weighed in! I should of course have remembered to single out contexts involving any form of motion as another class of systematic exceptions, whether it’s in route descriptions (including descriptions of static layouts from a ‘virtual tour’ perspective) or with respect to rivers.

One interesting feature that seems to separate geocentric systems from egocentric ones is the emergence of local and regional conventions. For instance, the usage David Gil reports from Sumatra seems to involve a clash between regional conventions and the actual local course of a river. This reminds me of similar reports in Wassmann & Dasen (1998) for Bali and Polian & Bohnemeyer (2011) for Tseltal Mayan communities. It’s not immediately obvious that egocentric usage is subject to local and regional conventions to the same extent, probably for fairly obvious reasons. The celebrated case of the so-called Hausa relative system (Hill 1982), where the observer’s axes are transposed onto the reference entity rather than to be reflected by it, is sometimes cited as an exception to this. But Hill in fact describes the transposed and reflexive relatives as alternative assignment strategies both of which are available in the speech community, which in my experience is the case in many populations.

Returning to my generalization, the case of Russian is indeed intriguing. It reminds me of Nikitina’s (2018) controlled elicitation study with Bashkir speakers, which indeed did not yield any geocentric uses of any kind, not even uses based on ad-hoc landmarks. I had never seen anything like it. I now wonder whether all of Europe is moving in that direction.

This dovetails with another important complex of questions about the worldwide distribution of referential practices. Today, to my knowledge, all communities in which dominant relative frame use has been documented either have post-industrial societies or societies that have shifted to, or are in the process of shifting to, majority languages of post-industrial societies. Put differently, there is not a single attested example I’m aware of in which an indigenous minority group uses predominantly relative frames without evidence of sustained bilingualism in or shift to a language of a surrounding relative-dominant culture. (Perhaps the most promising place to look for counterexamples are minority languages of China.)

This strongly suggests that the distribution of framing preferences over cultures is not stable, but is moving away from a prevalence of geocentric systems toward one of egocentrism.

Which in turn raises intriguing questions about the cultural history and prehistory of referential practices.

Lastly, Christian Lehmann made me aware of this page of his:

https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/lg_system/sem/index.html?https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/lg_system/sem/raumorientierung_2.html

It contains the following useful generalizations, which largely preempt mine:

• Wenn ein Volk den absoluten Bezugsrahmen zur mikrotopischen Orientierung benutzt, benutzt es ihn auch zur makrotopischen Orientierung.
• Wenn ein Volk den deiktischen Bezugsrahmen zur makrotopischen Orientierung benutzt, benutzt es ihn auch zur mikrotopischen Orientierung.

One might translate this as follows:

  *   If a group uses geocentric (‘absolute’) frames for small-scale orientation, it also uses them for large-scale orientation.
  *   If a group uses relative (‘deictic’) frames for large-scale orientation, it also uses them for small-scale orientation.

Thanks again, everybody! — Juergen

On Mar 5, 2021, at 8:55 AM, Peter Arkadiev <peterarkadiev at yandex.ru<mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>> wrote:

There is Rouen-Rive-Droite :-)

Peter

05.03.2021, 13:42, "Maia Ponsonnet" <maia.ponsonnet at uwa.edu.au<mailto:maia.ponsonnet at uwa.edu.au>>:
of course there is Paris-Rive-Gauche.
but on the other hand I'd say it's partly lexicalized.
people much more rarely talk about "rive droite", and I don't think the terminology applies in, says, Lyon with the Rhône for instance?
Maïa

Dr Maïa Ponsonnet
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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Tilman Berger <tberger at uni-tuebingen.de>
Sent: Friday, 5 March 2021 6:20 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Testing a generalization about spatial reference frames

Dear all,
I would like to support this point, that "left" and "right" can be lexicalized toponyms. There is the distinction of "Left-bank Ukraine" (Лівобережна Україна) and "Right-bank Ukraine" (Правобережна Україна), where "left" means the western bank and "right" the eastern. These terms have been in use since the 17th century.
Best wishes
Tilman

Am 05.03.21 um 11:05 schrieb David Gil:
Dear all,
Relative terms making reference to "left" or "right" may also be lexicalized to form toponyms.  For example, the country name Yemen is actually a lexicalization of the Arabic word for "right", drawing upon an canonical orientation facing the rising sun to the east.
David

On 05/03/2021 10:36, Dmitry Nikolaev wrote:
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.

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Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
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Fax: (716) 645 3825
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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.

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