171Ka:nina oḷage binna buḍu ade
There are fi refl ies inside the evergreen forest.
I: pa:riva:ḷa doḍḍa doḍḍa bareli, oḍḍinave ira:du
This pigeon is only found on big rocks, in the boulder fi eld.
It is highly probable that even though landscape and forest terms are used fre-
quently in everyday Solega speech, I was unable to document such utterances due
to the very specifi c contexts in which they are spoken. Naturally, many of my inter-
views, where I ask specifi c questions about the habitats of various plants and ani-
mals, contain these words, but even in lengthy recordings where one or more
speakers discuss forest-related matters, the preferred strategy is to use the general
term ka:ḍu. Two different sources of information suggest that the use of landscape/
forest terms is more widespread than is attested in the ‘ naturalistic speech ’ compo-
nent of my corpus. The fi rst is, ironically, the interview data I have presented in this
chapter. BG, the older consultant interviewed here, frequently used direct quota-
tions (uttered by real or fi ctional characters) in his narratives to create brief conver-
sations, and provide a sense of immediacy to his stories; examples of this strategy
can be clearly seen in Extracts XII, XXII and XXIV. In the latter two extracts, which
presumably represent an older adult admonishing a younger person, the landscape
terms are explicitly mentioned as places to go to, or avoid. This suggests that these
words are used in the context of making travel plans, or at the very least, asking the
hearer to avoid or go to a particular location. I was able to locate two other examples
of landscape term usage, which support this hypothesis:
Matte neḍi matte! I: oḍḍu ka:ḍiga ho:gõ!
Come on, start walking! Let’s go to the boulder fi eld!
A: hoṭṭinalli ho:gi turuguruve mudiya no:ḍru...
We went to the fallow land to forage and look for new hives ...
Incidentally, the above utterances were spoken by BG before the interview on
landscape terms had even begun; he simply volunteered a story about his past expe-
riences with farming and foraging soon after we had sat down to talk, and so these
two utterances, offered in quick succession, represent good examples of the use of
landscape terms in naturalistic speech.
The second type of data that can be mobilised to make a case for the frequent use
of landscape/forest terms is the large set of toponyms (discussed in detail in Sect.
3.7 ) which contain, as the last part of the name, the identity of the landscape or
hydrological feature on which the toponym is based. Once again, given that these
landscape and hydrological terms are part of place name s, one would expect them
to be used frequently in the context of travel, as in:
Alli serkae beṭṭa ho:gi hola eḍiya:du.
Then we went to Serkae Mountain, and cultivated some land.
This coupling of landscape/forest terms with ideas of motion or travel meshes
well with Gärling et al.’s [ 194 ] claim that “ information about the environment ( i.e.
the cognitive map ) is acquired in connection with the formation and execution of
travel plans ” (p. 22). Although their theory appears to have been developed primarily