Directionals, topography, and cultural construals of landscape in Lamaholot

3.1 Local scale with implicit ground

The directionals in (1) are frequently employed for spatial reference on the local scale with implicit ground, in which the ground is interpreted as the speaker, as in (3) and (4).

In these examples, the directionals are used for specifying the direction of the referent of the following NP from the implicit ground object, that is, the speaker. In (3), teti indicates that the house is upward—at a vertically higher position—while wəli in (4) shows that the house is located in a direction parallel with the coast, not specifying either the teti or lali direction (Map 2).^[5]

On the local scale, the speaker is the implicit ground, and thus the choice of directionals depends on the location of the speaker. For example, (3) is felicitous when the speaker is at a vertically lower position than the house, but (5) is instead used when the speaker is at a vertically higher position than the house.

Note that, on this scale, directionals cannot be employed for describing the position of an entity on a tabletop scale (cf. the explicit ground construal in example (14) in Section 3.3). For example, one cannot use (6) for referring to a table when it is located in the speaker’s personal sphere; it is only felicitous when it is far from the speaker.

The use of the directional rae ‘mountainward’ in (6) implies that the table is located far from the speaker. To avoid such an implication, one needs to employ a demonstrative rather than a directional, as in (7).

Importantly, on the local scale, the mountain–sea and the up–down axes are independent from each other. For this reason, different construals of the same situation can lead to the use of different directionals. In sentence (8), for instance, mə̃ ‘garden’ can be marked with either rae or teti.

In (8), mə̃ ‘garden’ is marked with rae ‘mountainward’ when its location is understood relative to the mountain, but as teti ‘upward’ when its vertical position is at issue.

3.2 Global scale with implicit ground

On the global scale or when spatial configuration is understood to be outside the speaker’s village or territory, the directionals in (1) do not refer to topographical concepts but rather to conventionalized directions in Lamaholot speakers’ interpretation of the topographic environments on Flores Island, as in (9).

There are three notes to make about (9). First, the directional wəli ‘a direction parallel with the coast’ is not used in this context. Second, the mountain–sea axis is still based on the physical geographical characteristics of the island, whereas the up–down axis is mapped to the east–west axis.^[6] Third, like the local scale with implicit ground discussed in Section 3.1, the implicit ground is the speaker, and the choice of directionals on this scale depends on the location of the speaker.^[7]

Examples of directionals on the global scale are given in (10) and (11). These examples would be spoken by someone located in Nurabelen.

In (10), Malaysia is marked with lau ‘the direction of the sea’, because it is overseas and reachable from Flores only by ship. In (11), Ende is preceded by lali ‘downward’. Ende is a large city in Central Flores (Map 1). Locations along the roads toward the western tip of Flores receive this marking.

Importantly, directionals are markers of local landmarks on the local scale but represent Lamaholot speakers’ cultural understandings of Flores on the global scale. First, teti and lali do not exactly correspond to the English cardinal terms east and west but rather represent both topographically motivated and culturally defined directions (Map 2). Second, teti and lali do not imply vertically high or low directions. For example, on the local scale, teti refers to higher ground, as in (3), but it does not have this entailment on the global scale, as in (12). Larantuka is at the same height above sea level as, but is located farther east than, Nurabelen (Map 1). That is why it is marked with teti ‘upward’.

3.3 Explicit ground

When the ground is not the speaker and is overtly expressed, directionals form a landmark-based coordinate system, represented in Figure 3. In this landmark-based coordinate system, two axes, the rae–lau and the teti–lali axes, bisect at the anchor point marked by the symbol “×”. This coordinate system is used for offering bearings for geocentric FoR.

Figure 3:

Coordinate system formed by directionals.

As seen in Figure 3, the directionals rae and lau refer to ‘the direction of the mountain’ and ‘the direction of the sea’, respectively, as they do on the local and global scales. In contrast, the up–down axis is mapped onto the coastal dimension. Here, the contrast between the mountain–sea and up–down axes is lost: the two distinct axes are mapped onto a single flat ground plane, at right angles to each other (but see Section 4.2). The directional wəli ‘parallel with the coast’ is not used in this construal.

This coordinate system is imposed on the figure–ground scene by the geographic environment regardless of the speaker’s position. In Nurabelen, for example, the position of the speaker’s father represented in Figure 4 can be expressed as in (13).

Figure 4:

Spatial configuration expressed in (13).

This landmark-based FoR can be employed not only on an intra-village scale, as in (13), but also on a tabletop scale, as in (14).

3.4 Summary

In this section, it was shown that directionals in Lamaholot point to different directions depending on how speakers construe spatial relationships. Three different construals are distinguished: the local scale with implicit ground, the global scale with implicit ground, and the explicit ground construal. For example, teti can be used to refer to ‘upward’ on the local scale, ‘the direction toward the eastern tip of Flores Island’ on the global scale, and a specific angle of the coordinate system in Figure 3. This represents not only lexical polysemy but also language-internal variation induced by speakers’ construals of the landscape. Different meanings of directionals represent different modes of interacting with the landscape.

4.1 Dominance of geocentric FoR

The role of the topographic environment in the Lamaholot spatial reference system can be observed most prominently in the dominance of geocentric FoR strategies in speech communities of this language. It is crosslinguistically common for a language to allow for more than one spatial reference strategy (Levinson 2003; Levinson and Wilkins 2006). However, Lamaholot shows a strong preference for geocentric FoR. In fact, geocentric FoR is the only versatile and productive FoR in this language: relative FoR is not available, and (non-geocentric) intrinsic FoR is restricted in terms of what can serve as the ground.^[8] Example (15) illustrates the fact that it is not possible to employ relative FoR in Lamaholot.^[9]

This is because wənə̃ ‘right’ in (15) is only a body part noun meaning ‘right hand’, and it is not pragmatically felicitous to say that nonhuman artifacts like chairs have hands.

In contrast, (non-geocentric) intrinsic FoR is available in Lamaholot, projecting a coordinate system with body part nouns, such as wənə̃ ‘right hand’, mekĩ ‘left hand’, wə̃hə̃ ‘front’, and pureʔ ‘back’. See (16) and (17).

In (16), the body part noun wə̃hə̃ ‘front’ indicates that the search domain for the palm tree is projected from the front (i.e., entrance) of the church. Likewise, in (17), mekĩ ‘left hand’ means that Nia is seated in the nearby area projected from Tanti’s left hand.^[10]

Importantly, within this type of intrinsic FoR, only human beings, animals, vehicles, and buildings with an explicit orientation (e.g., an entrance) can be the ground. This is because these body part terms can only refer to intrinsic parts of such entities. In particular, wənə̃ ‘right hand’ and mekĩ ‘left hand’ are exclusively used for human beings. Compare (17) and (18).

The intended meaning in (18) can only be felicitously expressed using directionals, as in (19).

Furthermore, the use of wənə̃ ‘right hand’ and mekĩ ‘left hand’ is limited to situations in which figure and ground are adjacent to each other. Thus, a spatial configuration of the type depicted in (17) is more commonly expressed with directionals, as in (20).

Thus, Lamaholot speakers in Nurabelen almost exclusively employ the directional-based geocentric FoR system for spatial reference. I consider this to be an influence of the topographic environment in which this language is spoken. This village is located along the coastal area between Mt. Lewotobi and the Solor Sea. The villagers are farmers and/or fishers. In these subsistence modes, they intensively engage with the topographic environment on a daily basis. A preference for geocentric/absolute FoR in rural settings is well attested in the literature (Majid et al. 2004; Palmer et al. 2017; Pederson 1993; Pederson et al. 1998).

4.2 Topographic influence on geocentric FoR

The external physical aspects of the topographic environment affect the use of the Lamaholot geocentric FoR system, just as geocentric FoRs in other languages can be sensitive to the environment (Bohnemeyer and O’Meara 2012; Levinson 2003; Palmer 2015; Wassmann and Dasen 1998). To begin with, it is crucial to emphasize that the location of a (particular) mountain is considered to be the most salient landmark in this coordinate system. For this reason, the correspondence between Lamaholot directionals and cardinal directions may change depending on the location of the speaker. In Nurabelen, for example, the landmark mountain is in the west, and the directionals rae, lau, teti, and lali correspond to the cardinal directions ‘west’, ‘east’, ‘north’, and ‘south’, respectively. But they refer to ‘north’, ‘south’, ‘east’, and ‘west’ in the village of Lewoawang, in which the landmark mountain is in the north (Map 2). In addition, the two axes employed for geocentric FoR, namely, the mountain–sea axis and the up–down axis, are not exactly orthogonal. In particular, the up–down axis can be flexibly adjusted and curved according to the physical shape of the coastline (Map 2).

Furthermore, the mountain–sea axis is determined by local topography. The directionals rae ‘the direction of a (specific) mountain’ and lau ‘the direction of the sea’ can possibly refer to different directions in different villages. In Nurabelen, which is sandwiched by Mt. Lewotobi and the Solor Sea, the directional rae points in the direction of Mt. Lewotobi, the one and only twin volcanic mountain in the village. However, there are at least four cases in which this simple geographical condition is not met: (a) a village is surrounded by more than one mountain, (b) more than one side of a village is adjacent to the sea, (c) a village is not adjacent to the sea, and (d) in foreign lands. In case (a), the mountain which serves as the mountain to which rae refers in this system is conventionally determined and can vary from village to village. In cases (b) and (c), lau simply refers to the opposite direction to rae, as defined above. Finally, in case (d), in a foreign land, it is the speaker’s responsibility to determine which mountain is used as the landmark, possibly resulting in variation among communities and individual speakers.^[11]

Importantly, these topography-induced features of the Lamaholot FoR system are characteristic of what Bohnemeyer and O’Meara (2012) call “landmark-based”, a subclass of geocentric FoRs. In the literature of Austronesian languages, such a system has often been labeled “absolute” (e.g., Palmer 2015; Senft 2006). In the classification adopted here (Bohnemeyer and O’Meara 2012: 218–220), however, landmark-based frames of the Lamaholot type are analyzed as intrinsic rather than absolute because they are not fully abstracted out of landscape features and they do not remain constant outside the village.