A Brief Foray into Spatial Frames of Reference

It's high time I posted something on here, and this is what I come up with!

In language, how we describe the relationships between objects’ positions can be based on different frames of reference, which Levinson classes as absolute, relative, and intrinsic.

In English, we use all three. We assign a ‘front’ to an object, for example:

‘the ball is in front of the chair’

In this example, it is intrinsic, the ‘front’ is one of function and use – we can see that the chair has a front, a back, and sides. However, we continue to assign these terms to objects with no front, using a relative FoR as in:

‘the pen is in front of the ball’

We also use absolute FoR, by using compass points, or external landmarks. Some frames of reference are based on the landscape – on small islands, you might say

‘the tree is sea-wards of the man’

or, in one language:

‘the tree is clock-wise-around-the-island of the man’.

Another language uses the nearest, largest mountain as a point of reference, so the frame of reference changes as the speaker travels.

The system that I find most interesting, and which most affects the way the speakers relate to the world is, I think, from Guugu Yimidhirr. Field linguists filmed a native speaker telling a story about a boat trip he took in which the boat overturned. In describing this, he acted out the boat tipping over by rolling his arms forward, in front of him. This was compared to a second video of the same speaker telling the same story, but this time he rolled his arms to the side. It was eventually realised that in the second video, he had been facing in a different direction, and adjusted his actions so that he was rolling his arms in the same direction according to a compass point. Guugu Yimidhirr uses north, south, east and west as external points of reference, and as such its speakers always know where north is, regardless of where they are in the world.