© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 135
A. Si, The Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Solega, Ethnobiology,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24681-9_5
Chapter 5
Landscape Terms in Solega
5.1 Introduction
The study of human conceptualisations of landscape, as they are encoded in the
world’s languages, has the potential to provide answers to some basic linguistic
questions, such as:
- Are there common cross-linguistic patterns in the way features of the landscape
are perceived and named? - What aspects of a landscape feature are incorporated into the name of that
feature? - What manner of cultural, utilitarian or other encyclopaedic information is associ-
ated with a named landscape feature? - How are different landscape features related to each other in people’s minds, and
how do these relationships manifest themselves in language? - Are there regular patterns in the way landscape features are given proper names,
and how do named landscape features, in turn, infl uence the naming of other
entities?
Many other questions have been posed by authors interested in investigating the
relationships between people, landscape and language. Three important collections
of language-centric studies on landscape have been published in recent years: the
fi rst is a special issue on ‘Language and Landscape: geographical ontology in
cross- linguistic perspective” in the journal Language Sciences , while the second is
an edited volume called “Landscape in Language: transdisciplinary perspectives”.
In their introductory article in the Language Sciences special issue, Burenhult and
Levinson [ 104 ] argued that landscape did not appear to be an independent semantic
domain like kinship or colour. Nevertheless, the fact that, in many of the languages
studied to date, culture, language and utilitarian considerations can all contribute
to some extent to the categorisation of landscape features, makes landscape a par-
ticularly interesting fi eld of investigation. The introductory chapter of the