Landscapes are essential to human life: they provide a multitude of material (food, water, pollination) and nonmaterial (beauty, tranquility, recreation) values. Their importance is enshrined in international conventions and treaties, committing signatories to protecting, monitoring, and managing all landscapes. Yet, relatively little is known about how people conceptualize “landscape” and its constituents. There is emerging evidence that conceptualizations of landscape entities may influence landscape management. This in turn raises the question as to how people speaking different languages, and with differing levels of expertise, may differ in conceptualizing landscape domains as a whole. In this paper, we investigated how people conceptualize landscape‐related terms in a specific domain—waterbodies—by comparing German and English‐speaking experts and nonexperts. We identified commonly used waterbody terms in sustainability discourses in both languages, and used those terms to collect sensory, motor, and affective ratings from participants. Speakers of all groups appear to conceptualize the domain of waterbody terms in comparable ways. Nevertheless, we uncovered subtle differences across languages for nonexperts. For example, there were differences in which waterbodies were associated with calm happiness in each language. In addition, olfaction seemingly plays a role in English speakers’ conceptualization of waterbodies, but not German speakers. Taken together, this suggests the ways in which people relate to landscape although shared in many respects may also be shaped in part by their specific language and culture.
This article elaborates on Wolfgang Schulze’s keynote speech of the same title at the 26th LIPP Symposium in
Munich in 2019. It is based on the slides from his talk and various teaching materials, of which some figures have been translated
from German to English before their inclusion in this article. While this article’s foundation rests on Schulze’s theories and
research, we have done our best to build upon his work; direct quotes and key concepts of his will be cited throughout the text.
Schulze intended to write this article himself, but after his unexpected passing in early 2020, we decided to offer this
contribution on his behalf.
Research on taboo is widely spread across diverse academic disciplines that each attribute slightly, yet
noticeably, different meanings to the concept. This article proposes an all-encompassing definition applicable to all
socio-cultural contexts. To arrive at this comprehensive understanding, we first briefly survey the history of
taboo and its linguistic study. Then, we present a formal and functional typology of circumnavigating taboos,
taking into account the concepts of mana and noa as proposed by Schulze (2019: 13, 15, 16). While the specific social restrictions resulting from tabooed relations vary from
community to community, the purpose of taboo remains the same: social stability, protection and sustainability. Linguistic taboos
contribute to these social functions by restricting the use of certain linguistic signs in certain situations. Such constraints
necessitate strategies for avoiding taboo, including articulation shift, lexical substitution and the emergence of special
languages, detailed here.
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