When “what” is “where”: A linguistic analysis of landscape terms, place names and body part terms in Marquesan (Oceanic, French Polynesia)

This article describes how the topography of the Marquesas Islands is reflected in the Marquesan language (East Polynesian, Oceanic, Austronesian) and how speakers of Marquesan use their linguistic resources to orient themselves in their environment. It addresses the semantic and lexical relationships (taxonomic, antonymic/oppositional, partonymic, etc.) between landscape terms, place names and body part terms, and how linguistic resources are mapped onto the environment. Particular focus is placed on morphosyntactic aspects of landscape terms. Landscape features form an unusual ontological category because their status as ‘being objects’ or ‘being places’ is unclear [Lyons, J., 1977. Semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Smith, B., Mark, D.M., 1998. Ontology and geographic kinds. In: Poiker, T.K., Chrisman, N. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH’98), pp. 308–320; Smith, B., Mark, D.M., 2001. Geographical categories: an ontological investigation. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (7), 591–612]. Marquesan is interesting in this respect because speakers are sensitive to a “what” and a “where” category in their language when talking about spatial relations. Classification of landscape terms is examined in this context. Furthermore, the article compares landscape terms with body part terms because studies of grammaticalisation of locatives also deal with the issue of when and how a body part term (a “what”) becomes a marker of location (a “where”). As will be shown, the grammaticalisation of body part terms to locatives reflects a similar kind of ambiguity as observed in Marquesan landscape terms.