Language in motion: terrain-based motion verbs and on the move documentation in Northwestern Amazonia
Karolin Obert, Lund University
Mobility is of central concern to the humanities. This is because mobility is everywhere: It is a
ubiquitous part of human existence, and it is a constant context for actions to happen and concepts
to unfold. Mobility as a domain of perception has received special attention for mobile Indigenous
groups in the field of anthropology especially in the context of cultural practices, social
interactions, subsistence, and environment (see Ingold & Vergunst 2008; Ingold 2008). However,
these approaches have often bypassed the possible ways in which motion can be expressed by
Indigenous communities themselves (O’Meara et al. 2020). Language opens a window to
systematically investigate the concept of motion through its linguistic instantiations in Indigenous
lexicons and grammars (see Burenhult 2008; Burenhult & Levinson 2008). Although the field of
linguistics has made great advances in the domain of motion from a descriptive and theoretical
perspective (see Talmy 1985, 2000; Slobin 2004; Guillaume 2021) motion typology has not yet
systematically explored the semantics as manifested in real-time and real-world contexts of the
speakers’ own motion. That said, the degree to which cultural and environmental real-world
parameters may be catalysts for fine-grained semantic distinctions in the domain of motion verbs
of remains underexplored. This leads us to two central questions: How can occurrences of motion verbs
map onto identifiable environmental and cultural features of a given culture, and how might these features motivate
fine-grained semantic distinctions? In this talk, I explore these questions based on an investigation into
Naduhup (Northwestern Amazonia) representations of motion in context, i.e., while speakers are
on the move. Specifically, Dâw and Nadëb walkers were videorecorded during foraging trips with
action cameras in tandem with a time-aligned GPS record, allowing for posterior analysis of
motion verb instantiations in the landscape. The results reveal how properties of the terrain can
systematically structure the basic motion verb inventory. This challenges prior predictions on the
impossibility of ground conflation in motion verbs in semantic theory (Talmy 2000:60-62), and at
the same time, allows for intriguing insights into less conventional ways of how languages can
structure and represent the domain of motion. The results also underscore how such an approach
can provide us with typological surprises revealing intangible Indigenous categories as present in
language and grammars, which account for the interactive, cultural, and historical contexts in
which these languages are spoken. This also opens windows into what is conceptually important
to speakers as visible in grammatical and lexical systems (see Talmy 1983; Heine 1997; Enfield
2002; Palmer et al. 2017). At the same time, on-the-move documentation can be a powerful way
of supporting communities in their potential desire to document and maintain vanishing cultural
and linguistic heritage related to mobility and territory.
References
Burenhult, Niclas (ed.). 2008. Language and landscape: geographical ontology in crosslinguistic perspective. [Special issue]. Language Sciences, 30(2-3).
Burenhult, Niclas & Stephen C. Levinson. 2008. Language and landscape: a crosslinguistic perspective. Language Sciences, 30(2-3).135-150.
Enfield, Nick J. 2002. Ethnosyntax: Introduction. In Nick J. Enfield (ed.), Ethnosyntax: Explorations
in culture and grammar, 1–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Guillaume, Antoine & Harald Koch (eds.). 2021. Associated Motion. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter
Mouton.
Heine, Bernd. 1997. Cognitive foundations of grammar. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ingold, Tim & Joe Lee Vergunst. 2008. Ways of walking: ethnography and practice on foot. Aldershot:
Ashgate Publishing.
Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being alive. Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London/New York:
Routledge.
O’Meara, Carolyn; Burenhult, Niclas; Rothstein, Mikael & Peter Sercombe. 2020. Representing
space and place: hunter-gatherer perspectives. Hunter Gatherer Research 4(3). 287-309.
Palmer, Bill; Lum, Jonathan; Schlossberg Jonathan & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does
the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology
21(3).457-491.
Talmy, Leonard. 1983. How language structures space. In Herbert L. Pick, Jr. & Linda P. Acredolo
(eds.), Spatial orientation: Theory, research, and application, 225–282. New York: Plenum.
Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy
Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, 36-149. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol 2. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Slobin, Dan. 2004. The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of
motion events. In Ludo Verhoeven & Sven Stromqvist (eds.), Relating events in narrative: Vol.
2. Typological and Contextual Perspectives, 219-257. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
