Where Snow is a Landmark: Route Direction Elements in Alpine Contexts

Abstract

Abstract. Route directions research has mostly focused on urban space so far, highlighting human concepts of street networks based on a range of recurring elements such as route segments, decision points, landmarks and actions. We explored the way route directions reflect the features of space and activity in the context of mountaineering. Alpine route directions are only rarely segmented through decision points related to reorientation; instead, segmentation is based on changing topography. Segments are described with various degrees of detail, depending on difficulty. For landmark description, direction givers refer to properties such as type of surface, dimension, colour of landscape features; terrain properties (such as snow) can also serve as landmarks. Action descriptions reflect the geometrical conceptualization of landscape features and dimensionality of space. Further, they are very rich in the semantics of manner of motion.

Using textual volunteered geographic information to model nature-based activities: A case study from Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Analysis of topographic feature glossaries, for example, has unveiled how classes such as processes and human intentions reflect human environmental experiences and can inform queries for topographical data analysis and mapping [73]. Analysis of VGI route directions has showed which types of landmarks and decision points support navigation in mountain areas [18], while further research has suggested ways of integrating this information for rescue operations [70]. Content analysis can also be facilitated through corpus linguistics techniques such as frequency-based analysis, identification of synonyms, or analysis of co-occurrences, performed on text pre-processed with part-ofspeech tags and syntactic relations [37,60].…”

Discovering Spatiotemporal Concepts in Discourse

“…Different conditions allow for establishing relevant contrasts, and can be enhanced by collecting more than one type of linguistic data. Note that CODA, in principle, can also be used to analyze existing language data, such as corpus data (e.g., Danino, 2014;Egorova, Tenbrink, & Purves, 2015); in such a case, data collection means identifying a suitable data set that can be meaningfully analyzed in this way.…”

Fictive motion in the context of mountaineering

“…Mountaineering is characterized by a close interaction with space in the process of navigation; till now, little research has looked into the way people experience and describe this unique type of space (Egorova, Tenbrink & Purves, 2015). We examine the use of a linguistic structure that reflects a certain perspective on a spatial scene -fictive motion (henceforth FM).…”