Inverted Stones and Shaman Houses: Semantic Typology of Landscape in Languages of North America
(2025) ALSK13 20242Division of Linguistics and Cognitive Semiotics
General Linguistics
- Abstract
- Landscapes fill a fundamental function of the human experience. The variance of these landscapes however, are vast, and arguably, so could the human experience of them and the ways they are expressed linguistically be as well. Of the few studies that so far has been conducted on this, none has focused on North America as a whole in a quantitative manner. This study aims to explore what systems languages, stretching over a large continent, may implement, what these systems would primarily be based upon, to what extent this is reflected in distribution of simplex and complex terms, and if formal and functional strategies correlate with geography or genealogy. Using a corpus consisting of grammars and dictionaries, and a list of 35 terms for... (More)
- Landscapes fill a fundamental function of the human experience. The variance of these landscapes however, are vast, and arguably, so could the human experience of them and the ways they are expressed linguistically be as well. Of the few studies that so far has been conducted on this, none has focused on North America as a whole in a quantitative manner. This study aims to explore what systems languages, stretching over a large continent, may implement, what these systems would primarily be based upon, to what extent this is reflected in distribution of simplex and complex terms, and if formal and functional strategies correlate with geography or genealogy. Using a corpus consisting of grammars and dictionaries, and a list of 35 terms for landscape features and materials, this study compiled data from 15 North American languages of different language families and spread out geographically. The study found that generally landscape terms are far more likely to be morphologically complex forms rather than monolexemic/monomorphemic whereas for material words the opposite is true. It was also found that there seems to be a correlation between unrelated inland languages in climates of low precipitation/vegetation and coastal languages in climates of high precipitation/vegetation, with the former being far more likely to rely upon morphologically complex forms. In general, material composition appears to be a far more common semantic category for the stems of complex forms than that of physical dimensions, spatial or kinetic/dynamic. The results of this study suggests that geographical and landscape features may influence the ways languages realize these terms possibly due to differing perceptual salience of features in differing geographical environments. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9191405
- author
- Wahlström, Daniel LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- ALSK13 20242
- year
- 2025
- type
- M2 - Bachelor Degree
- subject
- keywords
- semantic typology, landscape terminology, North America
- language
- English
- id
- 9191405
- date added to LUP
- 2025-05-28 17:32:19
- date last changed
- 2025-05-28 17:32:19
@misc{9191405,
abstract = {{Landscapes fill a fundamental function of the human experience. The variance of these landscapes however, are vast, and arguably, so could the human experience of them and the ways they are expressed linguistically be as well. Of the few studies that so far has been conducted on this, none has focused on North America as a whole in a quantitative manner. This study aims to explore what systems languages, stretching over a large continent, may implement, what these systems would primarily be based upon, to what extent this is reflected in distribution of simplex and complex terms, and if formal and functional strategies correlate with geography or genealogy. Using a corpus consisting of grammars and dictionaries, and a list of 35 terms for landscape features and materials, this study compiled data from 15 North American languages of different language families and spread out geographically. The study found that generally landscape terms are far more likely to be morphologically complex forms rather than monolexemic/monomorphemic whereas for material words the opposite is true. It was also found that there seems to be a correlation between unrelated inland languages in climates of low precipitation/vegetation and coastal languages in climates of high precipitation/vegetation, with the former being far more likely to rely upon morphologically complex forms. In general, material composition appears to be a far more common semantic category for the stems of complex forms than that of physical dimensions, spatial or kinetic/dynamic. The results of this study suggests that geographical and landscape features may influence the ways languages realize these terms possibly due to differing perceptual salience of features in differing geographical environments.}},
author = {{Wahlström, Daniel}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Inverted Stones and Shaman Houses: Semantic Typology of Landscape in Languages of North America}},
year = {{2025}},
}