Abstract
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.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Diversity in representing space within and between language communities
- A quantitative approach to sociotopography in Austronesian languages
- Directionals, topography, and cultural construals of landscape in Lamaholot
- A socially anchored approach to spatial language in Kalaallisut
- River-based and egocentric spatial orientation in Yine
- Geocentric directional systems in Australia: a typology
- The irrelevance of scale and fixedness in landscape terms in two Australian languages
- Changes in spatial frames of reference use in Iwaidja in different intergenerational contexts
- Cross-generational differences in linguistic and cognitive spatial frames of reference in Negev Arabic
- Sociotopography meets Dialectology: the case of Aquilan
- Conflation of spatial reference frames in deaf community sign languages
- Linguistic spatial reference systems across domains: How people talk about space in sailing, dancing, and other specialist areas
- The influence of language, culture, and environment on the use of spatial referencing in a multilingual context: Taiwan as a test case
- Reference frames in language and cognition: cross-population mismatches
- From the field into the lab: causal approaches to the evolution of spatial language
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Diversity in representing space within and between language communities
- A quantitative approach to sociotopography in Austronesian languages
- Directionals, topography, and cultural construals of landscape in Lamaholot
- A socially anchored approach to spatial language in Kalaallisut
- River-based and egocentric spatial orientation in Yine
- Geocentric directional systems in Australia: a typology
- The irrelevance of scale and fixedness in landscape terms in two Australian languages
- Changes in spatial frames of reference use in Iwaidja in different intergenerational contexts
- Cross-generational differences in linguistic and cognitive spatial frames of reference in Negev Arabic
- Sociotopography meets Dialectology: the case of Aquilan
- Conflation of spatial reference frames in deaf community sign languages
- Linguistic spatial reference systems across domains: How people talk about space in sailing, dancing, and other specialist areas
- The influence of language, culture, and environment on the use of spatial referencing in a multilingual context: Taiwan as a test case
- Reference frames in language and cognition: cross-population mismatches
- From the field into the lab: causal approaches to the evolution of spatial language