Directionals, topography, and cultural construals of landscape in Lamaholot

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates “directionals” or geocentric spatial terms in Lamaholot, examining the interaction between directionals, topographic environment, and cultural construals of landscape. Lamaholot is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia spoken on the volcanic island of Flores. The Lewotobi dialect, with which this paper is concerned, is spoken on the coastal area between Mt. Lewotobi and the Solor Sea. Reflective of this topographic environment, this language has “directionals” or grammatical terms defined with respect to landmarks: rae ‘mountainward’, lau ‘seaward’, wəli ‘parallel with the coast’, teti ‘upward’, and lali ‘downward’. After describing how the spatial orientation represented by directionals is embedded in linguistic and sociocultural practices in Lamaholot-speaking communities, this paper shows that directionals exhibit intriguing diversity in interpretation and morphosyntax: they constitute a coordinate system for geocentric frame of reference, refer to different directions depending on different construals of landscape, and can appear in various syntactic positions. It is argued that this diversity can be understood in terms of a complex interplay of topographic environment, sociocultural practices, language uses, and linguistic repertoire, as assumed in the Sociotopographic Model (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457–491). Thus, the directional system in Lamaholot makes a strong case for a sociotopographic approach to spatial language.