Atolls, islands, and endless suburbia: spatial reference in Marshallese

Spatial language and non-linguistic spatial cognition have been found to be correlated. However, there is debate as to the nature of this correlation. Some have suggested that these correlations are evidence for linguistic relativity, the proposition that arbitrary variation in linguistic preferences influences cognition. Others have suggested that spatial language and spatial cognition are similar because they both result from external environmental pressures. This thesis is an exploration of spatial Frames of Reference in Marshallese, an Austronesian language of the Marshall Islands. Marshallese is used as a case study to examine the relationship between spatial language, spatial cognition, and the physical environment. This study presents evidence from data collected using both established and innovative techniques in three field sites in the Marshall Islands and one in the United States. Together, these four sites represent three distinct topographies: an atoll, a singleton island, and an inland suburban area. These data are used to inform an extensive description of the structure of spatial reference in Marshallese more broadly. In addition, the spatial referencing strategies of the four sites are compared, not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively in the form of a frequency analysis of a corpus of 48 director-matcher ‘Man and Tree’ space games. Furthermore, data on non-linguistic aspects of spatial cognition are collected by means of the spatial memory tasks ‘Animals-in-a-Row’ and ‘Scout Game’. On the basis of this mixed-methods analysis of Marshallese, as well as a survey of recent studies on other languages, it is concluded that both linguistic relativity and environmental determinism have some explanatory power, but neither is sufficient for explaining the range of variation observed cross-linguistically, or in Marshallese specifically. Instead, the data points to a more complex ‘Sociotopographic Model’, where diversity in spatial reference emerges from speakers’ interaction with both one another, and their local physical environment.