Between Objects and Places: The Expression of Landforms in Lokono (Arawakan)

Topographic features are a special category of entities. Geographers conceptualize them as fields, that is, spatial distributions of an attribute (e.g., elevation) or, alternatively, as objects, that is, entities identified in space (e.g., mountains). But how do people actually conceptualize landforms and does it differ across cultures? This paper examines the linguistic encoding of landforms in Lokono. Lokono landform vocabulary includes the general term horhorho ‘landform’ and a number of complex non-lexicalized phrases based on it. The language grammatically distinguishes what-nouns (nouns denoting objects) from where-nouns (nouns denoting places). By looking at landform terms through the prism of this categorization, I show that they are classified as a network of connected places, rather than discrete objects, and are better represented in a field-based model. This description adds to our knowledge about the cross-linguistic encoding of topography and challenges the idea that humans conceptualize it predominantly on an object-based basis.