TY - JOUR

T1 - Linguistic expression of place appreciation in English and Welsh

T2 - A case study in North Wales

AU - Tenbrink, Thora

AU - Williams, Anwen Jago

PY - 2022/6/20

Y1 - 2022/6/20

N2 - Despite the prominence of ’place’ notions in human geography and beyond, thelanguage of place is surprisingly poorly understood. Platial research addresses human relations to places beyond the purely (geometric and cognitive) spatial aspects, whose linguistic features are well researched. This paper offers an in-depth case study of platial discourse in English and Welsh, contributing to a better understanding of how people use language to describe their attachment to a place. We asked 72 people to describe three local areas in North Wales in terms of what makes each one special and distinctive, along with further questions. We explore the responses in terms of a range of qualitative linguistic features indicating aspects such as proximity and ownership, identify a range of semantic categories relevant to the notion of place, and offer an exhaustive analysis of how one particularly popular local feature - castles - is referred to in our data. Beyond identifying how the three local areas differ with respect to the platial attachment associated with them, this paper offers lists of keywords for each of the identified platial semantic categories as a basis for future studies in the field. Our findings further suggest that ownership terminology, time references, and spatial inferences frequently characterise expressions of place appreciation,in different ways in English and Welsh.

AB - Despite the prominence of ’place’ notions in human geography and beyond, thelanguage of place is surprisingly poorly understood. Platial research addresses human relations to places beyond the purely (geometric and cognitive) spatial aspects, whose linguistic features are well researched. This paper offers an in-depth case study of platial discourse in English and Welsh, contributing to a better understanding of how people use language to describe their attachment to a place. We asked 72 people to describe three local areas in North Wales in terms of what makes each one special and distinctive, along with further questions. We explore the responses in terms of a range of qualitative linguistic features indicating aspects such as proximity and ownership, identify a range of semantic categories relevant to the notion of place, and offer an exhaustive analysis of how one particularly popular local feature - castles - is referred to in our data. Beyond identifying how the three local areas differ with respect to the platial attachment associated with them, this paper offers lists of keywords for each of the identified platial semantic categories as a basis for future studies in the field. Our findings further suggest that ownership terminology, time references, and spatial inferences frequently characterise expressions of place appreciation,in different ways in English and Welsh.

KW - place

KW - language

KW - appreciation

KW - linguistic features

KW - space

KW - discourse analysis

U2 - 10.5311/JOSIS.2022.24.209

DO - 10.5311/JOSIS.2022.24.209

M3 - Article

SP - 87

EP - 114

JO - Journal of Spatial Information Science

JF - Journal of Spatial Information Science

SN - 1948-660X

IS - 24

ER -