LANGUAGE & CULTURE:Are there Differences in the

Conceptualization of Landscape and Space?

David M. Mark, University at Buffalo

Cultural Differences

• Is GIS software biased toward the ‘culture’ that produced it?

• Or is it based on universal aspects of human conceptualization, computers, and geographic reality?

• These questions were often asked, in print and in talks, in the 1990s, but seldom answered

COSIT’95:

How significant are cultural differences in Spatial Cognition?

• Montello (1995) reviewed the topic

• What does it mean to claim that there are cultural or linguistic effects in Spatial Cognition?

• The ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’: Does the conceptual structure of language influence thinking?

What would it take to demonstrate Cultural Differences in Spatial

Cognition?• What ‘counts’ as “Cognition”?

• What ‘counts’ as “Spatial”?

• What ‘counts’ as “Cultural” or “Linguistic” difference in “Spatial Cognition”?

• Is there evidence that is so good that it would convince a (typical) psychologist?

Possible Kinds of Cultural/Linguistic Differences

• Reference Frames

• Spatial Relations

• Geographic Categories

• Wayfinding and Landmarks?

• (Other classes of possible differences?)

Re-stating the Question

• Are cross-linguistic and/or cross-cultural differences in spatial cognition greater than within-language and within-culture differences?

Frames of Reference• Whether speakers mainly use a

– relative, ego-based Frame of Reference, – a cardinal-direction/or landmark-based absolute

Frame of Reference, or – an object-based, intrinsic based Frame of

Reference– If more than one, which frames in which

situations?

• This also influences how they solve and conceptualize non-linguistic spatial tasks

Frames of Reference

• In some cultures, people use an absolute or cardinal directions reference frame even indoors

• Mean agreement values for 'cruzar' against 'crosses' (N = 135 to 144)

Spatial Relations

Spatial Relations in English and Korean

• Speakers of each language probably distinguish hundreds of ‘spatial relations’

• Each languages groups those into perhaps a dozen of so terms

• Languages group relations differently!

English

“in” “on”

Korean

Korean & English

• But do Korean speakers think that these situations are more similar to each-other than English speakers do?

• We don’t know!

Categories

• "Of all the countless possible ways of dividing entities of the world into categories, why do members of a culture use some groupings and not use others? What is it about the nature of the human mind and the way that it interacts with the nature of the world that gives rise to the categories that are used?”(Malt, 1995, p 85)

(Geo)Spatial Categories

• The question applies both to categories for spatial relations and to categories for spatial objects

• It also applies to the delimitation of object-like features from continuous geospatial fields

Where are the categories?

• Categories in the world (“Cutting nature at its joints”)? Or

• Categories from the mind? Or

• Categories in the words! "When I use a word, … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

• (Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”)

Categories

• “Psychologists are ultimately interested in concepts, that is, the mental representation that underlies the observed categories, and they have used a variety of measures to uncover different aspects of the mental representations”

• “Anthropologists, on the other hand, have focused primarily on analysis of the categories, that is, the sets of objects that are treated as equivalent and given a common name”

• (Malt, 1995, “Category Coherence …” p 134)

“… treated as equivalent and given a common name”

• A central research question for me is, which geographical entities are “treated as equivalent and given a common name,” and which are treated as different, placed into different categories, and labeled with different terms?

• And, which geographical entities are extracted (by human cognitive processes) from the continuous surface of the Earth, to even be considered to be entities?

‘Natural Kinds’ in the Landscape

• ‘Natural kinds’ may not exist at all, but there are strong approximations in some domains, such as plants and animals

• But there are few if any phenomena at landscape scale that come even close to being ‘natural kinds’

• Thus, there is more opportunity for cross-language differences in conceptualization and categorization in the geographic domain

Landscape Categories• For 8 years now, I have been conducting

research on landscape categories implicit in landscape terms in two indigenous languages (in Australia and the U.S.A.) has shown that the categories associated with common terms in these languages do not ‘line up’

• Furthermore, the landscape categories within each of these languages are different from the landscape categories inherent in English

Example 1: French and English Categorize Standing Water Bodies

Differently (Mark, COSIT’93)

No Outlet

English

No Outlet

French

No Outlet

Marnda

Language (left) (right)

English Hill Mountain Different Categories

Navajo Yisk‘id Dził Different Categories

Yindjibarndi Marnda Marnda Same Category

Example 2

Granularity of Categories

• If all we know is that something is a marnda, we do not know whether it is a mountain or a hill or a mesa

• We know less about it that we would know by knowing that it is a hill

Bikooh

Language (left) (right)

(American) English Arroyo, Dry wash Canyon Different Categories

Navajo Bikooh Bikooh Same Category?

Yindjibarndi Wundu (not a feature) ??

Example 3

River (in English)

• Oxford English Dictionary: A river is “a large stream of water…”

• The water, the bed, and the banks are (perhaps!) parts of the river

Example 4

Parts of a River(American English; 23 participants)

water 9mouth 9bank 6bed 3delta 3source 3current 2fish 2rock 2tributaries 2body 2(no answer) 2

What is a river?

• The fact that a river is still present even when there is no water in it means that the Oxford English Dictionary is wrong!

A “wundu” in Yindjibarndi country

Yindjibarndi: Wundu = River?

• No! Wundu refers to a stream channel, arroyo, or wash

• Wundu is usually dry

• If water is present, it is in the wundu, it is not ‘part of’ the wundu

• Yindjibarndi has several terms for the water, depending on flow intensity

Yindjibarndi: Flow Intensity

• mankurdu if flowing deep and fast

• yijirdi if flowing shallow and gently

• bawa if it is just lying there temporarily

• yinda if it is permanent

Thardarr

Back to GIS• If there really are significant cross-cultural or

cross-linguistic differences in “spatial cognition”, what are the implications for GIS?

• If the “GIS” is the ‘empty’ software, maybe only differences in spatial relations would have GIS implications

• Differences in entity types have implications for Spatial Data Infrastructures

Multilingual Ontology of Landscape?

• Within a language, the taxonomies and partonomies for landscape appear to be shallow

• Across languages, the taxa do not line up, so if we just intersect the categories we would get a combinatorial explosion

• Environmental modeling tends to use continuous fields of qualities of location; it is not obvious how to express those in DOLCE

Thank you for your attention!

Questions and Discussion?