Landscape, seascape and the ontology of places on Rossel Island, Papua New 
Guinea

Levinson, Stephen C.

doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2006.12.032

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Landscape, seascape and the ontology of places on Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea

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Levinson, Stephen C.
Language and Cognition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Categories across Language and Cognition, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Language documentation and data mining, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Levinson, S. C. (2008). Landscape, seascape and the ontology of places on Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea. Language Sciences, 30(2/3), 256-290. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2006.12.032.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0013-1ACE-1

Abstract

This paper describes the descriptive landscape and seascape terminology of an isolate language, Yélî Dnye, spoken on a remote island off Papua New Guinea. The terminology reveals an ontology of landscape terms fundamentally mismatching that in European languages, and in current GIS applications. These landscape terms, and a rich set of seascape terms, provide the ontological basis for toponyms across subdomains. Considering what motivates landscape categorization, three factors are considered: perceptual salience, human affordance and use, and cultural ideas. The data show that cultural ideas and practices are the major categorizing force: they directly impact the ecology with environmental artifacts, construct religious ideas which play a major role in the use of the environment and its naming, and provide abstract cultural templates which organize large portions of vocabulary across subdomains.