Randi will give a dry-run of her talk “Defining “community” through spatial reference: Communities of practice in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec” that she will present at the conference “Spatial Boundaries and Transitions in Language and Interaction” in Switzerland next Monday.
Full abstract available on Randi’s site: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~randituc/rem_BTLI2017_abstract.pdf
Ali will be presenting his QP data this week and discussing his ICLC presentation: “Principle of Canonical Orientation, a Cross-Linguistic Study.”
ICLC Abstract:
This study presents evidence for language-specificity in the violability of the Principle of Canonical Orientation (POCO) (Levelt 1996). POCO claims that there is a restriction on the use of intrinsic frames of reference depending on the orientation of the entity that the intrinsic frames is derived from. Reference frames are conceptual coordinate systems that are projected onto ‘figures’ and ‘grounds’ (Talmy, 2000: 312) in order to orient the former and locate it with respect to the latter. In intrinsic frames of reference, the ground object is the anchor that the axes are derived from. It has been shown that different frames of reference strategies are more prevalent than others in different language communities (e.g. Levinson, 2003).
POCO states that for “the intrinsic system to refer to a relatum’s intrinsic dimension, that dimension must be in canonical position with respect to the perceptual frame of orientation of the referent” (Levelt 1996: 92). That is, for the axes of the coordinate system to be anchored to the ground object, the ground object must be in its canonical posture. This restriction stems from the disalignment of the vertical axes of the ground object and the figure’s perceptual frame of reference. Thus, POCO predicts that speakers would not produce descriptions such as (1) below to describe the picture in figure 1.
(1) The ball is above the chair
However, it has been found that such descriptions are indeed produced by speakers of different language communities such as English and Yucatec speakers (e.g. Carlson-Radvansky & Irwin 1993). Bohnemeyer & Tucker’s (2010) findings suggest that POCO is not an absolute constraint but rather a tendency. The data in the present study are from 7 languages (K’iche’, Yucatec, Zapotec, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, and Taiwanese). Participants produced spatial descriptions during a referential communication task in which a director describes photos so that a partner may select a match.
Initial results from the first five languages mentioned above show that speakers of all languages use the intrinsic frames significantly less when the ground object is in non-canonical orientations. It is, however, found that degree of adherence to POCO varies across different languages. For example, K’iche’ and Yucatec speakers violate POCO significantly more than Spanish or Hijazi Arabic speakers. This crosslinguistic variation could be explained in terms of a preference for egocentric virsus allocentric frames in small space-scale. Intrinsic reference in languages that prefer egocentric frames seems to only be available under specified conditions. This does not seem to be the case in languages where allocentric frames are more prevalent. These findings addresses possible cross-linguistic differences in utilizing the human body as model for spatial reference assignment.
Randi Moore will give a dry-run of her planned talk at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (abstract below). Afterwards, Holly will present some of her data, since she was snowed out for our last meeting.
Come give feedback!
Landscape and Spatial Reference: Variation across three communities of Isthmus Zapotec speakers
How does local landscape influence descriptions of small-scale space? To answer this question I combine a large-scale analysis of spatial reference practices with ethnophysiographic studies in three communities of Zapotec speakers in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico: La Ventosa, subject to particularly strong “Tehuano” winds; Juchitán de Zaragoza, the urban center of the Isthmus; and Santa María Xadani, located on the Laguna Superior, with a salient hill situated in the middle of town. Data from a task describing three-dimensional objects in small-scale space show that speakers vary across communities in their use of spatial reference frames (strategies for locating or orienting objects based on the axes of speakers’ bodies, environmental features, or the objects themselves). Speakers in La Ventosa and Xadani show a strong preference for spatial reference frames anchored to the North-South winds and the rising and setting sun, while speakers in Juchitán use more frames anchored to landmarks such as their neighbors’ houses and the bodies of nearby individuals. These differences are reflected in responses to a word association task, where speakers were asked to name things that are “part of the environment, like ‘hill’, ‘river’, and ‘forest’”, responses which reflect the local landscape of each community: the strong wind (a physiographic cue) in La Ventosa, the nearby ocean in Xadani, or a general lack of salient landscape features in urban Juchitán. Together, these studies show that landscape affects community-specific linguistic practices by influencing selection of anchors of spatial descriptions in small-scale space.
This week we’ll hear from Kate. She’ll be discussing her findings from her dissertation research. Come find out about how people tell others to solve mazes, and how to arrange dolls.
Join us this week for a brainstorming session with Erika, looking at data for her QP.
Join us this week for a discussion of space and robots! We will be talking about readings from Spranger 2016: The evolution of grounded spatial language, available on our UBLearns site.
Juergen will present Chapter 10, Kate will present Chapter 11, and Stephanie will present Chapter 13.
Don’t have access to our UBLearns site? Email us!
Juergen will present on Future in tensless languages. Come join us in 617 Baldy on Tuesday.
