Niclas Burenhult

Language as key to perceptual diversity: an interdisciplinary approach to the senses

This project will open up new horizons in the human sciences by providing scientific access to human diversity. It does so by situating field linguists at the center of an interdisciplinary research framework in which language expertise provides the crucial point of connection between researchers and lesser-known speech communities and knowledge systems. The project explores human perception, a field in which recent research hints at considerable but still poorly understood variation across human languages and cultures. To this end, the project brings together a unique and highly qualified team representing Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, Geoscience and History of Religion to investigate language of perception in three diverse Language Observatories. Combining well-established methods with novel ones, the research focuses on two fundamental and interrelated arenas of perception: landscape and ritual. Acknowledging that language provides a window on both cognition and culture, the project bridges the gap between psychological and cultural approaches to the senses. The results will speak to a wide audience of perception specialists in different fields, as well as the general public. The program promises to establish the language sciences and humanities at large as key players in interdisciplinary initiatives involving diverse branches of science.
Final report
PROJECT AIMS AND DEVELOPMENT
The overarching aim of the project was to develop an environment and model for innovative interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by situating field linguists at the center of an interdisciplinary research framework in which language expertise provided a crucial point of connection between researchers and lesser-known speech communities and knowledge systems. In the spirit of the RJ jubilee funding scheme, its explicit intention was to broaden the horizons of humanities research through cross-fertilization within and beyond the human and social sciences, thereby allowing the formulation of new, interesting and important research questions. In this respect the project has reaped a rich harvest. Over the course of the project period, the dynamic interaction between project members from Linguistics, Psychology, History of Religion, and the Geosciences generated a flurry of ideas, a number of which have been turned into research questions and studies. Every project study and output reported here represents a cross-disciplinary undertaking involving two or more of the participating disciplines.

IMPLEMENTATION
The project idea fundamentally built on an empirical infrastructure involving language observatories in lesser-known, small-scale speech communities, and associated linguistic expertise. This environment provided unique empirical access for disciplines for which such communities are otherwise typically out of practical or analytical reach. This also allowed us to formulate new research fields and questions which span across disciplines. The project thus pursued intensive fieldwork in four language observatories: Aslian (Malay Peninsula), Avatime (Ghana), Penan (Borneo), and Navajo (New Mexico). Our interdisciplinary discourse revolved broadly around the theme of human perception, and a variety of research ideas addressing this theme were developed and pursued.

THREE IMPORTANT RESULTS, CONCLUSIONS
1. Considerable effort went into methodological development for exploring the senses in large-scale space, aiming to create analytical environments for the investigation of multisensorial representations of landscape. In an innovative program, action cameras were put to use to make simultaneous audiovisual and geospatial recording of and by language users moving through, interacting with, and talking about the surrounding large-scale environment. The cameras recorded the visual and auditory percepts as well as the visual and auditory aspects of human communication (gestured and spoken language), and their built-in GPS recorded the exact spatial location of percepts and utterances. Moreover, in a pioneering scheme, we extracted and integrated the geospatial data into ELAN, a tool developed for time-aligned annotation of audiovisual media. By calibrating the audiovisual and geospatial signals on the timeline and inserting the geo data as a tier in the annotation tool, we generated an environment in which time-aligned annotations of audiovisually observed behavior can be conveniently linked and explored in relation to the corresponding geographical coordinates. This represented a considerable conceptual leap, allowing us to make exquisitely fine-grained analyses of the relationship between percepts, utterances, and locations. We applied this methodology in all our observatories.

2. Much project work addressed the challenge of linguistic diversity in relation to assumed fundamental environmental concepts and its implications for sustainability science and policy. Our studies of forest concepts are good examples. These highlight the diversity in human perception and expression of and approaches to forested land, consistently overlooked in international forestry programs. Our studies are the first ever linguistic forays into the semantics of tree cover. The results provide a sobering reminder to policy-makers and organizations active on the ground that a seemingly straightforward concept like “forest” doesn’t travel well and that successful implementation of such agendas requires a thorough understanding of local indigenous classification systems. In a separate investigation we showed that “landscape” – a core concept in international environmental conventions – is an ill-defined domain that is conceptualized in different ways across languages, even closely related ones. Thus, our project has situated for the first time language and linguistic diversity at the heart of the global sustainability goals. This aspect promises to be one of the main long-term achievements of the project.

3. Our project produced a rich body of interdisciplinary research on environmental perception and categorization in the respective language observatories. One line of approach involved the combination of linguistic and geographic expertise in the employment of Geographical Information Systems to document and explore spatial categories collected with GPS. Specifically, categories like place names and motion events were analyzed on the basis of terrain models, including parameters such as elevation, gradient, and stream order/accumulation, in an effort to achieve a better understanding of the semantic principles behind the linguistic categories. This unique interdisciplinary work pioneered the use of GIS in the investigation of real-world instantiations of fine-grained linguistic categories. – Another strand of project research combined linguistic and psychological expertise in targeting the five sensory modalities and how these receive linguistic expression in the respective language. Through structured elicitation by means of specially designed stimulus and interview kits, the project investigated strategies of describing percepts and how conventionalized and stable these strategies are across speakers in a given community. Our work on unusual strategies of representing olfaction has received particular attention. – Yet another line of research combined linguistic expertise with that on religion and belief systems, developing a framework for studying and understanding the role of perception and environment in ritual language vis-à-vis language at large. – Furthermore, the project explored the role of subsistence and societal characteristics in how the environment is perceived, conceptualized, and expressed. Here we paid special attention to how highly mobile communities like hunter-gatherers relate to space, place, and landscape, pointing to intricate diversity and complexity in the relationship between language, cognition, and culture. Our unconventional interdisciplinary approach provided new insights in this regard and we promoted our methods, results and model of collaboration to a wider anthropological audience. – Finally, our project generated a substantial record of deeply annotated recordings of linguistic practices as well as geospatial recordings. These unique datasets from lesser-known and endangered speech communities were developed into a multimedia resource, sustainably organized and stored in a lasting research and archive environment, and available also for future reference.

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The project’s unique access to indigenous communities, languages, and knowledge systems attracted the interest of several external scholars in fields like psychobiology, sustainability science, and food science. A number of new collaborations and research ideas emanating from the project are at different stages of development and promise to progress in the near future.

DISSEMINATION, OUTREACH
Project output has been continuously published in international scientific outlets, predominantly as articles in high-impact journals, including for example Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Frontiers in Psychology, Science, Linguistics, PLOS One, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Journal of Linguistic Geography, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and Topics in Cognitive Science. – Project results have also been regularly presented at major international conferences and workshops (altogether 18), including for example Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Association for Linguistic Typology, International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics, International Conference on Austro-Asiatic Linguistics, Association of American Geographers Meeting, International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation, and CogLing. – Public outreach has taken the form of public lectures by project members, as well as popular scientific publications (including a contribution to The RJ Yearbox 2021). Outreach has also involved close collaboration with and feedback to the speech communities studied by the project.
Grant administrator
Lunds universitet
Reference number
NHS14-1665:1
Amount
SEK 13,657,000.00
Funding
New prospects for humanities and social sciences
Subject
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Year
2015