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 in- teractions 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 do- main 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 knowl- edge, 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. 2.