Spatial Language in Alpine Narratives

Abstract

The general goal of this project is to explore user generated descriptions and develop suitable methods for working with large corpora. In particular, we are interested in examining the way people address their experiences in non-urban natural space through the prism of alpine narratives found in blogs and on the alpine clubs` webpages. The starting point of the research is the non-universal character of space conceptualizations and its dependency on various aspects of context. We aim to study these aspects – those related to the physical world (such as the scale of activity), as well as those related to socially- and individually-dependent constructs (such as the sense of place). By focusing on a specific set of linguistic features – for example, landscape terms – we want to determine how they are used in different ways across different contexts.

PhD candidate

Ekaterina Egorova

Supervision

Ross Purves (Department of Geography, UZH), Thora Tenbrink (Cognitive Linguistics Group, Bangor University)

Funding

URPP Language and Space