Frames of reference in Toba of Western Formosa (Guaicuruan, Argentina)

Abstract

This paper analyzes, from a semantic typological perspective, the spatial subdomain of angular stasis or frames of reference in Toba of Western Formosa (Guaicuruan, Argentina). The corpus is composed of data obtained, through the visual stimulus ‘Men and Tree Photo Matching’ (Levinson et al., 1992), at Vaca Perdida (Formosa, Argentina). The frames of references found are absolute, object-centered, and direct. While absolute and object-centered frames of reference encode positional and orientational information, the direct one only expresses the orientation of the man from the deictic center. The absolute coordinate system, and the encoding of the orientation of the man are prominent in the corpus. The use of the same visual stimuli to study frames of reference among other languages of the South American Gran Chaco region will provide regionally comparable data and contribute to the knowledge of the structure of the spatial semantic domain.

Keywords
Space; Semantic typology; Coordinate systems; Guaicuruan