Landscape, Spatial Semantics and a Sense of Place in Greenland

Landscape, spatial semantics and a sense of place in Greenland

Lenore A. Grenoble The University of Chicago [email protected]

20 November 2015

Studies of the linguistic encoding of spatial relations inform an understanding of the interactions between language, cognition, and the external environment and help explicate similarities and diﬀerences in the cross-linguistic structuring of space. Across the Inuit- Yupik languages of the Arctic, we ﬁnd a rich framework of spatial understanding embedded with environmental and sociocultural knowledge within the speech patterns, paralleling a deep connection between the Inuit and their physical environment.

In this talk I present a theoretical ontology for the nexus of spatial language and landscape terminology in one Inuit language, Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), the oﬃcial and majority language of Greenland. Kalaallisut exhibits a complex grammatical and lexical system for the encoding of spatial relations, which includes an extensive demonstrative system, relational nouns signifying intrinsic topological relations, a coastal (and, more recently, cardinal) based orientation system (Fortescue 1988), a complex system of slope terms, spatial locating verbs, and local case morphology. A fundamental part of the spatial domain in Kalaallisut is landscape terminology. Existing research on the locality of place in Greenland reveals a deep connection between the Inuit and their physical environment, identifying landscape as “memoryscape” (Nuttall 1991), permeated with cultural knowledge, narrative, and experience.

Using the frameworks of ethnophysiography and landscape linguistics as well as studies in spatial cognition, (e.g. Burenhult & Levinson 2008; Levinson & Wilkins 2006), I demon- strate that the spatial domain as a whole is cognitively and culturally structured with reference to the physical landscape. Culturally speciﬁc conceptual ontologies are encoded in landscape terms, and I present a theoretical ontology for the interrelationship between the two. The most obvious instantiation of this claim is in the coastal-based orientation system, but more broadly, the frame of reference system is landmark-based (Bohnemeyer & O’Meara 2012) and deeply anchored in the physical geography of Greenland. At the

1 same time, landscape terminology is framed within larger interactions across the spatial domain.

References

Bohnemeyer, J¨urgen& Carolyn O’Meara. 2012. Vectors and frames of reference. Evidence from Seri and Yucatec. In Katarzyna Jaszczolt & Luna Filipovi´c,(eds.), Space and time in languages and cultures: Language, culture, and cognition, 217-248. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Burenhult, Niclas & Stephen C. Levinson. 2008. Language and landscape: A cross- linguistic perspective. Language Sciences 30, 135-150.

Fortescue, Michael. 1988. Eskimo orientation systems. Meddelelser om Grønland 11.

Levinson, S. C. & Wilkins, D. P., eds. 2006. Grammars of space: Explorations in cognitive diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nuttall, Mark. 1991. Memoryscape: a sense of locality in northwest Greenland. North Atlantic Studies. 1(2): 39-50.