137The cognitive map is basically a semantic long-term memory representation of the proper-
ties of and the components in the environment that has been acquired through repeated
encounters with that environment. The particular content of the cognitive map is adapted to
its function and, if this function is to facilitate movement and travel in large-scale and
medium-scale environments, it includes information about places (destinations for travel),
spatial information, and travel instructions. (p. 25)
Linde and Labov [ 198 ] pioneered the use of small-scale mapping tasks in order
to obtain a rich corpus of domain-specifi c spontaneous speech, with which to probe
their consultants’ spatial reasoning. They asked New York City residents to describe
their apartments, as this subject, they argued, had the advantages of being general,
well-motivated, controlled, objective, well-practiced, and occurring in a conven-
tional social setting. They found strong regularities in the way their consultants
described the layout of the rooms in their apartments: two major patterns dominated,
namely the ‘existential construction’ (... through an archway is the living room ) and
the ‘tour’ (... if you kept walking straight ahead, directly in front of you, you would
fi nd a bathroom ) (pp. 929–930). There were also strong correlations between the
branching patterns of rooms (off a hallway) and the speaker’s inclination to ‘enter’
it during the imaginary ‘tour’.
The aims of the current chapter differ from the Linde and Labov study in four
important ways. First, the scale of the spatial network investigated here is the entire
B. R. Hills ecosystem, consisting of a mosaic of several habitat types, and covering
over 300 km^2. The distances involved, and arguably also the complexity of the
components in the spatial network, are naturally far greater than in the Linde and
Labov study, and this may have a profound infl uence on the way people conceptu-
alise such a network. Second, the New York study tried to uncover regularities in the
way people described their apartments through the medium of language; the actual
contents of the apartments were, in themselves, of little consequence. Here, I am
interested in fi nding out not only how people talk about landscape and forest types,
but also the encyclopaedic knowledge they possess about the characteristics of
these places. Third, while the apartments of New Yorkers—at least the features of
the apartments that would normally be described to a naïve listener—can be
expected to remain more-or-less static, the forest that the Solega live in is a highly
dynamic spatial network. Ecosystems are constantly changing entities, and the
drivers of this change include the life cycles of plants and animals (i.e. the phenol-
ogy^2 of these species), the migration of animals, the swelling and subsiding of water
bodies, and the cycling of the seasons.
At least seven different tree phenological stages are recognized in Solega, on
the basis of the appearance (or absence) of vegetative and reproductive struc-
tures on the tree; these include baḷḷu ‘bare’, eḷa:ku ‘new leaves’ (indicating a
previously bare deciduous tree that has just begun to sprout new leaves), ele
‘leaves’ (indicating a foliage-covered tree), muggu ‘buds’, hu: ‘fl owers’, ka:yi
(^2) Phenology is the study of recurring plant and animal life cycle stages, or phenophases , such as
leafi ng and fl owering of plants, maturation of agricultural crops, emergence of insects, and migra-
tion of birds (USA National Phenology Network website).