From Text to Space: Spatial Discourse in Alpine Route Directions and Narratives

Motivation and Goal: The general goal of this project is to explore user-generated descriptions and to 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 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.

Cooperation: This project constitutes the PhD thesis of Ekaterina Egorova, supervised by Ross Purves and Thora Tenbrink (Cognitive Linguistics Group, Bangor University).

State and Outcome: The PhD project is completed (PhD thesis defense April 12, 2018).