Volume 8, Issue s1 - Sociotopography; Editors: Alice Gaby, Bill Palmer, Jonathon Lum and Jonathan Schlossberg.

Few areas of cognition are as fundamental to our lives as representing physical space. However, the way languages represent space varies widely, as does non-linguistic spatial behavior. Research on spatial language casts light on the relationship between language and conceptual structure, and across linguistic and non-linguistic modalities. Most research in this domain treats languages as individual data points, typologizing them on the basis of, for example, preferred frame of reference, such as the egocentric viewpoint-based relative FoR (terms like left and right ), versus a geocentric or absolute FoR (terms like north and south ). The papers in this special collection demonstrate that considerable variation exists in spatial language within as well as between language communities, and that a diverse array of factors interacts to drive this variation, from terrain to group-level cultural practices and associations, from individual demographic diversity to innate cognitive biases. Drawing on the notion of sociotopography (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457–491), the papers in this special collection explore the interaction of factors that shape spatial behavior in language and beyond.

Absolute spatial orientation systems are pervasive and diverse among Austronesian languages, and decades of research has suggested that such systems are motivated at least in part by environmental and cultural factors. In this paper, we take a quantitative approach to the study of orientation systems by presenting the results of an exploratory multifactorial analysis of spatial orientation systems across 131 Austronesian languages, representing nearly all available data on orientation systems for the family. We analyze these data using multinomial logistic regression to uncover correlations between orientation type and four predictor variables representing cultural and environmental factors: geographic distribution, economy, geography (proximity to the sea), and ruggedness of terrain. Our model suggests that while not entirely predictive of the type of orientation system, the factors geography and economy alone account for much of the variation among spatial orientation systems in our sample, supporting a “weak” form of the Sociotopographic Model (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457–491). Additionally, this study demonstrates the potential of quantitative analytical methods for exploring the relationship between culture, environment, and spatial orientation systems.

This paper investigates “directionals” or geocentric spatial terms in Lamaholot, examining the interaction between directionals, topographic environment, and cultural construals of landscape. Lamaholot is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia spoken on the volcanic island of Flores. The Lewotobi dialect, with which this paper is concerned, is spoken on the coastal area between Mt. Lewotobi and the Solor Sea. Reflective of this topographic environment, this language has “directionals” or grammatical terms defined with respect to landmarks: rae ‘mountainward’, lau ‘seaward’, wəli ‘parallel with the coast’, teti ‘upward’, and lali ‘downward’. After describing how the spatial orientation represented by directionals is embedded in linguistic and sociocultural practices in Lamaholot-speaking communities, this paper shows that directionals exhibit intriguing diversity in interpretation and morphosyntax: they constitute a coordinate system for geocentric frame of reference, refer to different directions depending on different construals of landscape, and can appear in various syntactic positions. It is argued that this diversity can be understood in terms of a complex interplay of topographic environment, sociocultural practices, language uses, and linguistic repertoire, as assumed in the Sociotopographic Model (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457–491). Thus, the directional system in Lamaholot makes a strong case for a sociotopographic approach to spatial language.

In this article we demonstrate the fundamental relationship between the linguistic encoding of spatial relations and the topography of Greenland as an island, more specifically as a large island with considerable inland ice, and social engagement with that space. Kalaallisut (or Greenlandic, ISO 639-3 kal) uses an absolute frame of reference and a cardinal direction system that arises from an environmentally anchored coastal orientation system. Sociocultural knowledge and experiences play an important role in this system. It is deeply rooted in the geophysical environment, and changes to that environment can and do affect the linguistic encoding of space. Crucially, changes in people’s relationship with the environment affect how it is conceptualized in language. This is part of a broader pattern of Inuit language usage in changing Arctic environments and societies.

In linguistic studies on spatial reference frames, South American languages are still underrepresented. This explorative study offers a qualitative discussion of strategies that were found to encode location and orientation of objects in Yine, an Amazonian language of Peru. Geocentric and egocentric frames were attested as equally dominant strategies to provide spatial information in a picture-matching task, the results of which are split by age group of speakers. Senior Yine speakers mainly used river-oriented geocentric and intrinsic frames, whereas young adult speakers relied on egocentric and intrinsic frames exclusively. Left/right/behind relators were predominantly interpreted in allocentric-intrinsic frames by speakers of both groups but egocentric-extrinsic frames also arose in spatial descriptions elicited from younger speakers.

This paper presents the results of a survey of geocentric directional systems across Australia using published and unpublished material as well as fieldwork data, providing the first systematic overview of such systems in Australia. The 116 sampled varieties, spoken across diverse landscapes, exhibit variation within and across languages. Many make use of more than one directional system. This paper sets out to create a systematic typological overview of geocentric directionals in Australia taking into account cultural and topographic salience, revisiting existing classifications of directional systems.

This article examines how the speakers of Manyjilyjarra (Great Sandy Desert) and Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u (Cape York Peninsula) linguistically categorize the landscape in which they live. Located on opposite sides of Australia, in highly contrasting arid inland and tropical coastal environments, the semantics of the landscape feature terminology in these two Australian languages have key similarities. Both lexical sets overwhelmingly classify the landscape with the use of abstract and general concepts of shape and material make-up. Together with a lack of specification of size or fixedness in this terminology, this presents intriguing issues for received conceptualizations of landscape in the geosciences and language sciences. This article finds that complex and recurrent interests in material make-up extend beyond landscape feature terminology in both languages and reveal possible cultural priorities underlying the semantic patterns.

Research into sociocultural factors affecting the use of spatial frames of reference (FoR) has begun to move away from characterizing FoR choice as inherent to each language, instead emphasizing variation within speech communities, but has so far paid little attention to variation in individual speaker’s FoR use with different addressees. This paper reports on differences in two senior adults’ use of FoRs in Iwaidja when addressing a peer compared to addressing a child. Performing the Man and Tree task, the speakers made frequent use of geocentric descriptions with their peers, and substantially fewer geocentric descriptions with a child. The study was conducted in a complex multilingual speech environment where younger generations’ language use is shifting away from Iwaidja towards English and to other Australian languages. Factors motivating the different FoR choices in child-directed speech may include elements of parentese and accommodation to the children’s incomplete acquisition of Iwaidja. The children’s contact with English, particularly through schooling, may affect the adults’ expectations of the children’s acquisition of frames of reference in English. Drawing attention to the impact of the addressee in spatial speech, this study adds to understanding sociocultural elements of spatial reference in the context of language contact and shift.

This paper analyses the impact of landscape on linguistic and cognitive spatial frames of reference (FoRs) in three generations of speakers of Negev Arabic (NA): Traditional (TNA), Middle (MNA), and Young (YNA). When locating one object (the figure) with respect to a reference object (the ground), TNA strategies rely on pragmatic properties attributed to the ground (e.g. familiarity) and to axial constraints (alignment between figure, ground, and the observer’s visual field). When the ground is familiar and asymmetrical, intrinsic FoR is preferred; when it is familiar and symmetrical, a Speech Act Participant (SAP)-landmark strategy is preferred if figure, ground, and observer are aligned, otherwise absolute FoR is used; when the ground is unfamiliar, absolute FoR is preferred. Absolute FoR is not used in MNA, while in egocentric reference, a relative reflection strategy is used. MNA applies right–left distinctions using reflection and rotation strategies. YNA uses intrinsic FoR and relative reflection without predicable rules; absolute FoR and SAP-landmark FoR are absent; and the right–left axis applies to all ground objects. All generations apply geocentric FoRs in non-linguistic tasks within the Negev region, but outside this region, each used different strategies. Negev landscapes are fundamental constituents of NA FoRs across generations.

The goal of this paper is to offer an argument for the Sociotopographic Model and its extension to dialectal data. It is shown that Italian and one of its dialects, Aquilan, seem to differ with respect to which reference systems their prepositions can describe. Aquilan includes an absolute and an elevational reference system; Italian only includes an absolute system. It is proposed that this difference is strongly correlated to Aquilan being a dialect spoken in a mountainous valley, and therefore reflecting the “lay of the land” in its spatial lexicon. The paper offers an experimental study involving two groups of informants (group 1, age >70.0 years, N  = 13; group 2, age <40.0 years, N  = 10). It is shown that both groups can use the elevational system in Aquilan, but generational differences are attested. Some conclusions regarding connections between Sociotopography and Dialectology are offered.

Linguistic spatial descriptions are not purely arbitrary, but are to some extent motivated by many interactive factors. For example, whether the language community is predominantly urban or rural may motivate its reliance on relative or absolute reference frame (Dasen and Mishra 2010; Pederson 1993, 2006). This review paper contributes to Sociotopography in two ways: first, by showing that the distribution of reference frames reported in the literature corresponds to deaf community sign languages and village sign languages (thus the urban-rural differences generalize across modalities), and second, that deaf community sign languages all allow their users to employ a conflated intrinsic-relative frame, which is possibly due to affordances of the visual-manual modality (a modality-specific feature). Comparing the visual-manual and the aural-oral modalities therefore shows that some variation in spatial descriptions correlates with the environment regardless of the modality used, but also highlights modality-specific properties.

Spatial reference systems have been investigated across many different languages and cultures, partly with the explicit aim of identifying preferred ways of thinking and talking about space in a particular culture. This paper addresses variability within a given language (and culture) by looking at diversity across everyday specialist domains. Wherever a domain requires people to interact with space in a specific way, conventions for thinking and talking about space arise that are far less common outside those domains. For instance, in sailing it is almost impossible to talk about ‘forward movement’, due to the various forces acting on the boat; these require the sailor to calculate a useful course relative to the goal direction. Based on a range of examples, this paper explores customary ways of talking about space across various domains, and highlights the underlying spatial-conceptual reference systems. This demonstrates how different situational domains call for different reference systems, contrary to beliefs that entire cultures can be associated with stable preferences for a specific reference system.

This study examines the Sociotopographic Model (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457–491. DOI:10.1515/lingty-2017-0011) by exploring the use of spatial frames of reference in two genealogically related languages with rather distinct spatial features in a multilingual context. Taiwanese Min Nan (TMN) and Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese (MC), exhibit distinct features in spatial reference in small-scale space, including a geocentric preference among TMN speakers for using cardinal directions or external landmarks and a relative preference among MC speakers for projecting the viewer’s perspective onto the object. The study extended the research design of Bohnemeyer and his colleagues (Bohnemeyer, Jürgen, Katharine T. Donelson, Randi Tucker, Elena Benedicto, Alejandra Capistrán Garza, Alyson Eggleston, Néstor Hernández Green, María Hernández Gómez, Samuel Herrera Castro, Carolyn K. O’Meara, Enrique Palancar, Gabriela Pérez Báez, Gilles Polian & Rodrigo Romero Méndez. 2014. The cultural transmission of spatial cognition: Evidence from a large-scale study. In Paul Bello, Marcello Guarini, Marjorie McShane & Brian Scassellati (eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society , 212–217. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society) to the scope of bilingualism in order to explore how language, culture, and environment affect the use of spatial reference in bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. The research method comprised a discourse and a recall memory study. Contrary to the alignment between discourse and recall memory found in monolinguals, bilinguals displayed mixed patterns. Regression analyses indicated that, in addition to language, effects of environment emerged: topography was positively correlated with geocentric use, supporting the Topographic Correspondence Hypothesis (Palmer, Bill, Alice Gaby, Jonathon Lum & Jonathan Schlossberg. 2016. Topography and frame of reference in the threatened ecological niche of the atoll. Paper presented at “Geographic grounding: Place, direction and landscape in the grammars of the world”, University of Copenhagen, May 2016 ). A strong education effect had an impact on geocentric use in both studies, suggesting the possibility of the cultural mediation between language and environment.

Numerous studies have found evidence of a speech community’s referential practices in discourse being predictive of its members’ behavior in nonverbal tasks. In this article, we discuss a series of exceptions to this alignment pattern, drawing on data from eleven populations of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and Central America, and Oceania. These exceptions have not been discussed in conjunction with one another and the striking commonalities across the findings of these studies have gone unnoticed: (a) in discourses referring to small-scale space, either intrinsic frame use is dominant or both relative and geocentric frames are used frequently in addition to intrinsic frames; and (b) in recall/recognition memory, geocentric coding is more common than egocentric coding (in tasks that involve stationary stimulus configurations) in nine of the populations, while in the remaining two, there is evidence of extensive intrinsic coding even in nonverbal cognition. We discuss these findings in light of Haun’s innate geocentrism hypothesis (Haun, D. B. M., C. Rapold, J. Call, G. Janzen & S. C. Levinson. 2006. Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in hominid spatial cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(46). 17568–17573). Our data offers partial support for this hypothesis, but simultaneously calls into question whether any extrinsic reference frames are available innately.

Striking variation exists in preferences for specific spatial linguistic strategies among different speech communities. Increasing evidence now suggests that this might not simply be a result of neutral drift, but rather a form of linguistic adaptation to the local social, cultural, or physical environment. Recent studies indicate that different factors like topography, subsistence style, and bilingualism successfully predict the choice of spatial frames of reference (FoR) on linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. However, the exact causal relationships between these variables and the cultural evolutionary mechanisms behind the selection of one FoR strategy over another are still not fully understood. In this paper, we argue that to arrive at a more mechanistic and causal understanding of the cultural evolution of spatial language, observations from descriptive fieldwork should be combined with experimental and computational methods. In the framework we present, causal relationships between linguistic and non-linguistic variables (such as FoR choice and topography) can be isolated and systematically tested in order to shed light on how sociotopographic factors motivate the variation in spatial language we observe cross-linguistically. We discuss experimental results from behavioral studies and computer simulations that illustrate how this approach can deliver empirical findings that go beyond simple correlations.