Linguistic categories and their utilities The case of Lao landscape terms》.pdfVIP

Language Sciences 30 (2008) 227–255 /locate/langsci Linguistic categories and their utilities: The case of Lao landscape terms N.J. Enfield Language and Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PB 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, Netherlands Abstract Different domains of concrete referential semantics have provided testing grounds for investiga- tion of the differential roles of perception, cognition, language, and culture in human categorization. A vast literature on semantics of biological classification, color, shape and topological relations, arti- facts, and more, raises a range of theoretical and analytical debates. This article uses landscape terms to address a key debate from within research on ethnobiological classification: the opposition between so-called utilitarian and intellectualist accounts for patterns of lexicalization of the natural world [Berlin, B., 1992. Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ]. ‘Utilitarianists’ argue that lexical categories reflect practical consequences of knowing certain category distinctions, related to cultural practice and functional affordances of referents. ‘Intellectualists’ argue that lexical cate- gories reflect people’s innate interest in the natural world, combined with the perceptual discontinu- ities supplied by ‘Nature’s Plan’. The debate is generalizable to other domains, including landscape terminology, the topic of this special issue. This article brings landscape terminology into this larger debate, arguing in favor of a utilitarian account of linguistic categories in the domain of landscape, but p