Abstract
This paper provides a brief survey on various absolute frames of spatial reference that can be observed in a number of Austronesian languages - with an emphasis on languages of the Oceanic subgroup. It is based on research of conceptions of space and systems of spatial reference that was initiated by the “space project” of the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group (now the Department of Language and Cognition) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and by my anthology “Referring to Space” (Senft 1997a; see Keller 2002: 250). The examples illustrating these different absolute frames of spatial refer-ence reveal once more that earlier generalizations within the domain of “SPACE” were strongly biased by research on Indo-European languages; they also reveal how complex some of these absolute frames of spatial reference found in these languages are. The paper ends with a summary of Wegener’s (2002) pre-liminary typology of these absolute frames of spatial reference.
Highlights
In 1991 I joined Stephen Levinson’s “Cognitive Anthropology Research Group” at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen
In her study Claudia Wegener first classified different types of absolute systems for spatial reference based on their usage and developed three approaches towards a typological classification of these systems
In his 2002 paper Bill Palmer emphasized that his survey on absolute spatial frames of reference in Oceanic languages reveals that features of the physical world motivate these linguistic systems; he concludes that perceptual input can determine linguistic structure
Summary
First analyses of the data gathered in the languages researched by members of our project revealed fundamental differences in how these languages refer to space (see Senft 1994; 1995; 2001: 526f.) For describing these differences we have been using a typology of spatial systems or frames of spatial reference. In these systems (and in our data) we find sentences like Note that this absolute frame of reference was not acknowledged — and even assumed to be non-existent — in previous linguistic research on conceptions of space and forms of spatial reference. In the introduction to this volume I summarized recent findings on conceptualizations of space and spatial reference in Australian Aboriginal, Austronesian, Papuan, and some Mayan languages and showed that we must give up many of our notions of universals with respect to space and spatial reference. This paper provides a brief overview of research results on various absolute frames of spatial reference that can be observed in a number of Austronesian languages — with an emphasis on languages of the Oceanic subgroup — as well as a summary of Claudia Wegener’s (2002) preliminary typology for these absolute frames of spatial reference
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