Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
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David Herman
His research interests include interdisciplinary narrative theory, discourse analysis, conversational storytelling, and cognitive science and narrative. His publications include
Universal Grammar and Narrative Form (1995);Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2002);Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003); andPřirozený jazyk vyprávě;ní [Narration in Natural Language ] (2005).
and
Susan Moss
Her research interests include indigenous plants and sustainable agricultural practices.
Abstract
Examining the rich naming systems associated with plants, this paper suggests how ethnobiological (specifically, ethnobotanical) inquiry can benefit from greater cooperation and synergy among fields concerned with naming practices, including onomastics, lexicography, cognitive anthropology, and cognitive linguistics. Our pilot-study focuses on the names of approximately one hundred heirloom vegetables culled from seed catalogues and other publications devoted to the preservation of seeds for varieties of vegetables passed down from generation to generation (e.g. Brown 1996; Bradshaw 2001; and Rakita 2003). We characterize these plant names as elements in a folk-taxonomic system, arguing that the study of such native nomencla-tural schemes can productively inform research on the mapping relationships among names or words, conceptual categories, and structures in the world. In turn, research in ethnosemiotics, defined broadly as the study of native understandings of sign-systems (Hoppál 1988; Voigt 1994), stands to gain from a more extensive integration of tools developed by theorists of verbal language and of the cognitive bases for cross-culturally attested naming patterns. Interdisciplinary work of this kind promises not only to advance ethnosemiotic research, but also to help separate out what is cognitively universal from what is culturally variable in semiotic and communicative processes in general.
About the authors
His research interests include interdisciplinary narrative theory, discourse analysis, conversational storytelling, and cognitive science and narrative. His publications include Universal Grammar and Narrative Form (1995); Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2002); Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003); and Přirozený jazyk vyprávě;ní [Narration in Natural Language] (2005).
Her research interests include indigenous plants and sustainable agricultural practices.
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
- Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded
- Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
- Bridging theories: A logical-functional perspective on languages
- The ‘handles’ and ‘sides’ of metaphor
- Here is the author! Hyperlinks as constitutive rules of hypertextual communication
- Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
- The serpent's egg: Communication and the bio-semiotics of image making
- Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry
- Symbol-intertextuality-deconstruction (on the dialectic of stability and variability of concept and symbol)
- Analyse paradigmatique d'un corpus de proverbes à l'aide des matrices de concepts
- Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
- Peirce on categories: Towards a metaphysical foundation of pragmatics
- Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
- Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
- Structures and semiotic systems
- Eye on Picasso
