Spatial frames of reference preferences in Juchitán Zapotec

Comparison Types in the Semantic Extension of Diidxazá Body Part Terms

“…As mentioned earlier, the experimental tasks administered by the MesoSpace showed that the relative FoR is heavily dispreferred across speakers of MesoAmerican languages, including Diidxazá. Pérez Báez () shows that in describing the orientation of a ground and in describing the location of a figure with respect to the same ground, speakers of Diidxazá heavily prefer the use of absolute FoRs based on cardinal points, and intrinsic (object‐centered) FoRs. This was established on the basis of data collected via the Ball and Chair referential communication task.…”

“…In the MesoSpace task, the participants were presented with an array of three symmetrical toy animals, and then asked to commit the array to memory and reproduce it under a 180‐degree rotation condition. Pérez Báez () reports that out of 114 trials run with 19 participants, only once was a response array consistent with relative FoRs. Moore () reports that on a referential communications version of this same task, run with 196 speakers of Diidxazá in three different communities, the relative FoRs were consistently dispreferred.…”

“…The data have been provided since 1995 by 15 native speakers from the communities of La Ventosa, Juchitán de Zaragoza and Santa María Xadani. The detailed analysis of lexical items revealed the extensive use of BPTs across the lexicon of the language, prompting a number of studies such as Pérez Báez (, , 2012) as well as the MesoSpace project itself.…”

“…Crosslinguistic data from Mesoamerican languages including Diidxazá did not, on the whole, support this hypothesis. In Diidxazá, however, the intrinsic FoRs were indeed used with frequency and were second after the reliance on cardinal points within absolute FoRs which were clearly the preferred strategy (Pérez Báez, ). Overall, what the crosslinguistic data revealed is a dispreference for the relative FoR (O'Meara & Pérez Báez, ).…”

“…Juchitán Zapotec or Juchiteco is used in the context of the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica within which this study was initiated. These terms provide greater precision as to the localities where the data were collected (see, for instance, Pérez Báez, 2011, 2012, ). Finally, the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas refers to the language as zapoteco de la planicie costera (INALI, ).…”