Geographic and manipulable space in two Tamil linguistic systems

Abstract

This paper concerns the linguistic and conceptual contrast between 1) egocentric or speaker-relative spatial reference (such as left/right systems) and 2) absolute spatial reference (such as the use of cardinal directions). Urban Tamils, like European culture, use NSEW exclusively with large-scale or geographic space. In stark contrast with this, rural Tamils use absolute NSEW to depict their manipulable space, e.g. objects located on a table, as well as their geographic space. Urban and rural Tamil speakers were asked to match photographs by verbal description. The director and matcher had identical sets to select from, but they could not see one another's choices. The photos in these sets varied either in the horizontal relations of the depicted objects or along some other nan-targeted relationship. Matches involving horizontal plane relationships were relatively more difficult for speakers using a relative system than for speakers using NSEW. The nature of these errors suggests that fundamental methods of manipulating conceptual representations of space vary according to the basic linguistic system used by each community.

Thanks to V. Krishnaswami and P. Velraj of Madurai for their invaluable assistance with data collection and transcription. Additional thanks to Christy Bowerman for help with the graphics and Misja Peters and Bernadette Schmitt for help with the statistics. Considerable thanks to David Wilkins and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier draft of this paper. The remaining problems are mine alone.

This work is part of a larger project of about a dozen people (in the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) using such techniques as described here to investigate various linguistic systems of representing spatial relationships from around the world. Thanks to the entire group for their contributions to the design of the project and for comparing their results in their languages of research with the Tamil results.