Language, Space and Place

Hip Hop Parody as Veiled Critique

by Chris Taylor

*draft*

Universality, language-variability and individuality: defining linguistic building blocks for spatial relations

by Kristin Stock

Stock, K. and Cialone, C. (2011). Universality, Language-Variability and Individuality: Defining Linguistic Building Blocks for Spatial Relations. To be presented at COSIT 2011: Conference on Spatial Information Theory, Belfast, Maine, USA, 12-16 September 2011.

Most approaches to the description of spatial relations for use in spatial querying attempt to describe a set of... more Most approaches to the description of spatial relations for use in spatial querying attempt to describe a set of spatial relations that are universally understood by users. While this method has proved successful for expert users of geographic information, it is less useful for non-experts. Furthermore, while some work has implied the universal nature of spatial relations, a large amount of linguistic evidence shows that many spatial relations vary fundamentally across languages. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a body of linguistic research that has identified the few specific spatial relations that are universal across languages. We show how these spatial relations can be used to describe a range of more complex spatial relations, including some from non-Indo-European languages that cannot readily be described with the usual spatial operators. Thus we propose that NSM is a tool that may be useful for the development of the next generation of spatial querying tools, supporting multilingual environments with widely differing ways of talking about space.

Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial Identities

by Gabriella Modan

Mango Fufu Kimchi Yucca: The Depoliticization of “Diversity” in Washington, DC Discourse

by Gabriella Modan

Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1

by Gabriella Modan

“They live in Lonesome Dove”: Media and contemporary Western Apache place-naming practices

by M. Eleanor Nevins

Language in Society 2008

This article treats a place-naming genre among residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation in which people use... more This article treats a place-naming genre among residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation in which people use English-language mass media discourse to name newly constructed neighborhoods on the reservation, usually with humorous effect. It is argued that these names do not represent simple assimilation to mainstream discursive norms. Instead, they represent the deployment of media discourse according to locally defined speech genres and language ideology to comment on social changes brought about by the new housing developments. As a strategy for engaging with the dominant
society, these names are acts of community self-definition that confound mainstream expectations for place names generally, and for Native American place names in particular. They celebrate participation in media discourse, but in terms that privilege reservation insiders. Use of these names constitutes the reservation as an interpretive community in which participation is defined not along nationalist models of citizenship, but in terms of locally established idioms of sociality. (Discourse and place, genre, intertextuality,
mass media, Western Apache, place names, Native American,
narrative, joking, verbal play)*

A Tale of Two Castles: An anthropological investigation of castles as constructed places with changing senses through the contextualization and analysis of le Château d’Angers, le Château de Josselin, and their intertwined human histories.

by Rachel Carpenter

A Senior Thesis in Anthropology, submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College in April of 2011.

Ethnogeographical categories in English and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara

by Helen Bromhead

Published in 'Language Sciences' Volume 33, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 58-75

This study examines the contrastive lexical semantics of a selection of landscape terms in English and the Australian... more This study examines the contrastive lexical semantics of a selection of landscape terms in English and the Australian Aboriginal language, Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. It argues that languages and cultures categorize the geographical environment in diverse ways. Common elements of classification are found across the languages, but it is argued that different priorities are given to these factors. Moreover, the study finds that there are language-specific aspects of the landscape terms, often motivated by culture and land use. Notably, this study presents ethnogeographical concepts as being anchored in an anthropocentric perspective, based on human vision and experience in space. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) technique of semantic analysis is used throughout, and it is argued that this methodology provides an effective tool in the exploration of ethnogeographical categories.

Deixis, gesture, and cognition in spatial Frame of Reference typology. Studies in Language 34(1): 167-185.

by Eve Danziger

Danziger, E., 2010. Deixis, Gesture and Cognition in Spatial Frame of Reference Typology. Studies in Language 34(1): 167-185.

The three Frames of Reference recognized in the current inventory of spatial-language types are differentiated by... more The three Frames of Reference recognized in the current inventory of spatial-language types are differentiated by their placement of the Anchor from which the vector of search space from Ground to Figure is calculated (Levinson 1996). In certain well-recognized examples, Anchor merges with Ground. The existing analysis treats this merged component as analytically Ground rather than Anchor; its location in or out of the speech situation is therefore taken to be independent of the Frame of Reference typology. Instead, I treat this component as analytically Anchor, making its speech-situation status criterial to the typology. Four, not three, Frames of Reference now appear. The fourth, “Direct”, frame, distinguishes binary locutions with a speech participant as Ground/ Anchor (e.g. ‘in front of you’) from ‘Object-Centered’ binary locutions in which Ground/ Anchor is not a speech participant ( e.g. ‘in front of the kettle’). This four-frame analysis corresponds better than does the three-frame one to the logic of rotation sensitivity which has been used to show Whorfian parallels between language and conceptualization across cultures. I close by discussing the application of the Frame of Reference typology to pointing gestures, and show how recognition of the fourth frame of reference allows us to bring discussion of these, and the linguistic demonstratives and locatives with which they so frequently co-occur, fully within the Frame of Reference typology.

Language, Space and Sociolect: Cognitive Correlates of Gendered Speech in Mopan Maya

by Eve Danziger

Danziger, E. 1999. Language, Space and Sociolect: Cognitive Correlates of Gendered Speech in Mopan Maya. In Language Diversity and Cognitive Representations. Catherine Fuchs and Stéphane Robert (eds). Pp 85-106. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2011. Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies. Political Geography. 30 (2), 90-98.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that... more Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.