Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T10:43:29.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Spatial operations in deixis, cognition, and culture: where to orient oneself in Belhare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Balthasar Bickel
Affiliation:
University of Mainz
Jan Nuyts
Affiliation:
Universitaire Instellung Antwerpen, Belgium
Eric Pederson
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
Get access

Summary

Introduction

The question I want to raise, ‘Where to orient oneself’, addresses two issues. First, it asks for the type of deictic field within which spatial information is transmitted. This issue is motivated by my attempts to understand what Belhare people mean when they tell you, for instance, to move something toba ‘up’; for it is by no means obvious where toba is. Secondly, the question looks for the domain in which spatial information is encoded and for the relation of this domain to grammar, semantics, and cognition. More specifically, I inquire into the effects that spatial deixis has on the grammar of Belhare, on the quality of different ‘senses’ in deixis (is there linguistically resolvable polysemy? or mere contextual vagueness?), and on the relation of linguistic deixis to other cognitive modalities that are basic to spatial orientation and manifest in cultural patterns and social behaviour. I address the cross-modal questions from a linguistic point of view, seeking for structural parallels in non-linguistic cognition.

The language and people I am concerned with are called Belhare (Nep. Belhālre or Belhārīya) or Belhare Rai, the term Rai (Nep. Rāī) being the collective ethnonym for a subgroup of the Kiranti (Nep. Kirãtī) people in Eastern Nepal (cf. Vikal & Rāī 2051, Bickel 1996). The language is spoken by some two thousand people. Virtually all speakers are bilingual, also speaking Nepali, the national Indo-Aryan lingua franca, but Belhare is still the preferred means of communication.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×