Project

Language, cognition and landscape: understanding cross-
cultural and individual ...

Project acronym LACOLA

Researcher (PI)

Niclas Burenhult

Host institution
(HI)

LUNDS UNIVERSITET, SVERIGE

Call details

ERC-2010-StG, SH4

Summary

This project will break new ground in the language sciences by
pursuing a linguistic inquiry into landscape. From the linguist s
point of view, the geophysical environment is virtually
unexplored. Yet it has vast potential for influence on the
discipline. The project will play a pioneering role in situating
landscape within linguistics as a fundamental domain of
representational systems, opening up important links to other
disciplines concerned with landscape that usually have little to
do with language.

It will achieve this by (1) exploring landscape categorization in a
number of languages, (2) comparing such categorization, (3)
developing a model for understanding categorization across
languages and speakers, and (4) documenting vanishing
landscape systems.

The research team will study landscape categorization in six
diverse language settings. Each setting is a case study carried
out by a team member with expert knowledge and prior field
experience of the setting. Each setting offers opportunities of
studying closely related languages as well as individuals
speaking the same language, making comparison possible not
only among maximally diverse languages but also at finer levels
of linguistic granularity. An exploratory psycholinguistic
subproject will probe the relationship between language and
cognition in the landscape domain.

The project will blaze a trail in applying GIS to linguistic data, in
testing advanced experimental techniques in the field, and in
documenting domain-specific data from a global language
sample. Cross-cultural variation in landscape ontology is a
matter of great practical importance understanding the
meaning and reference of landscape terms and place names is
crucial to major fields of human cooperation, from navigation to
international law.

Website (HI)

http://www.lu.se

Max ERC funding 1.5 million Euros

Duration

60 months

Source URL:

http://erc.europa.eu/cordis_search/project_details/97289

Published on

ERC: European Research Council

(

http://erc.europa.eu

)

Language, cognition and landscape:

understanding cross-cultural and individual

variation in geographical ontology

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Source URL:

http://erc.europa.eu/cordis_search/project_details/97289

2