Calendrier

• Laurène Barbier (DDL-CNRS Université Lumière Lyon 2)

séminaire NINJAL

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Spatial frames of reference, as theorized by Levinson (1996, 2003), have been applied to describe the many types of orientation systems attested in the world’s languages, either relative, absolute or intrinsic. As shown in the literature on other language families such as, for example, Austronesian (Blust 2013; Nagaya 2020) and Sino-Tibetan (Post 2019; Shirai 2020), the description of spatial orientation has often proved useful in understanding the encoding of direction across languages (Honkasalo 2019: 533-544; Nagaya 2020). In this context, Upper Negidal, one of two varieties of Negidal, a now moribund North-Tungusic language (Whaley & Oskolskaya, 2020) spoken in the Russian Far East by four speakers with variable language practices (Pakendorf & Aralova 2018) remains underdescribed. Despite its critical linguistic situation, its spatial system has not yet been the object of an in-depth and systematic research. The Negidals are a semi-sedentary people, traditionally established along the middle reaches of the Amgun River, a tributary of the Amur River (Pevnov & Khasanova 2006: 450). The North of the Lower Amur basin is indeed a region of rivers surrounded by taiga forests, and it is reflected in the Negidal’s traditional economy based on fishing. Given this close relationship with rivers, the aim of this presentation is to examine the characteristics of Upper Negidal’s orientation system, particularly in terms of expressing riverine motion. The purpose is to describe how orientation in Upper Negidal expresses information on direction and how closely related it is to the riverine surroundings. Hence, what is Upper Negidal’s spatial frame of reference? To what extent does riverine vocabulary play a particular role in Upper Negidal’s spatial grammar? And how is it embedded in the orientation system? For the purpose of this study, I examined a corpus of narratives told by 9 Upper Negidal speakers (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017). From this corpus, I extracted 3733 utterances expressing spontaneous translational motion (i.e. not caused by an event or a person). The data was then coded following Slobin’s Berkeley coding manual (2005). The analysis of these narratives, whether life anecdotes or folk tales and legends, reveals frequent references to rivers, highlighting the Negidals' profound connection to their riverine environment. It shows how deeply intertwined it is with the linguistic and social practices of the community. It is indeed reflected in Upper Negidal spatial grammar, since riverine verbs, directionals and relational nouns are attested in the language’s system, as also described in other Asian languages (Sims & Genetti 2017:121-123, Honkasalo 2019: 533). Results reveal that Upper Negidal displays an absolute orientation system based on the river flow and the topographical features linked to the rivers, such as riverbanks and forests rising from the riverbed, that characterizes Upper Negidal’s area of practice. In fact, Upper Negidal orientation system can be represented as a biaxial system composed of a forest-river vertical axis, perpendicular to the river, and an upriver-downriver horizontal axis, therefore parallel to the river.

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