19Solega language as a “ a vehicle of communication in everyday life ”. Such an
approach, coupled with the presentation of transcribed and translated utterances
from my corpus of audio recordings, has allowed me to maximise the volume of
semi-naturalistic (i.e. obtained from interviews), culturally relevant and contextual-
ised linguistic data on which subsequent analyses and conclusions are based.
Briefl y, the themes covered in this book begin with a consideration of Berlin ’s
universals of nomenclature and classifi cation (Chaps. 2 , 3 and 4 ), a discussion of
what is named, and why, and an illustration of dialectal variation in the naming of
Solega birds (Chap. 4 ). Chapter 2 deals with some important theoretical issues that
have a great bearing on how people construct and interact with such classifi cations.
This chapter critically examines some key assumptions that are prevalent in the eth-
nobiological literature, and asks whether there really are ‘universals’ in the way peo-
ple identify, categorize and name the living organisms in their environment. The
plants of the Solega’s forests are discussed in Chap. 3 , with the focus being on
nomenclature and its relationship to scientifi c taxonomy. These issues are contextu-
alised through cultural notes on Solega people’s attitudes towards plants, the central
role that plants play in the coining of place name s, the importance of large, individual
named trees in Solega culture, and the myriad interactions that people have with
plants of all sorts in their everyday lives. Chapter 4 continues the themes of Chap. 2 ,
and demonstrates how real language data can often come into confl ict with
homogenising theories by describing, in detail, the naming and classifi cation of birds
in the Solega language. Here, the substantial discussion on classifi cation and taxon-
omy is followed by an account of the very important role some birds play in Solega
religion, folklore and everyday life—a second foray, following the ethnobotanical
discussion of Chap. 3 , into the world of encyclopaedic ecological knowledge.
The latter half of the book steps away from the question of taxonomies, and
defi nitively enters the realm of the encyclopaedic and ontological. I begin with the
largest possible scale—that of entire ecosystems. In Chap. 5 , I attempt an informal
semantic description of landscape and forest terms in Solega, and a discussion of
possible relations between information structure and perceptual salience. The
descriptions presented here demonstrate how the Solega perceive their forest home
as an interconnected mosaic of habitat types. These habitats are home to distinctive
assemblages of plants and animals which show seasonal life-cycle or migrational
patterns—the Solega conception of these patterns is overlaid on their mental repre-
sentation of the forest habitats, resulting in a temporally-updating map of natural
resources (and other salient phenomena) in the physical–biological environment.
Continuing the theme of large-scale processes and patterns, Chap. 6 includes a
description of the natural cycles that the Solega routinely observe in their forest, and
the ways in which these are encoded in everyday language. This includes not only
the plant phenological cycles mentioned in the preceding chapter, but also the annual
monsoon cycle, which is divided into several meaningful phases. I go on to describe
smaller-scale patterns that Solega people often talk about, such as the spatial and
temporal signs that indicate resource availability, and the relationships that other
organisms have with each other. I then suggest a hypothesis to explain why the
knowledge of such relationships should be important to the Solega. In Chap. 7 , I
zoom in from the macro- to the micro-scale, and describe in detail Solega knowledge
1.5 Book Outline