Featured publication
Palmer, Bill, Alice Gaby & Jonathon Lum. 2025. Spatial frames, variation, and sociotopography. In Eric Pederson & Juergen Bohnemeyer (eds.) The expression of space. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. [forthcoming] https://www.academia.edu/123349501/Spatial_frames_variation_and_sociotopography
Publications
Blythe, Joe, Francesco Possemato, Josua Dahmen, Caroline de Dear, Rod Gardner, and Lesley Stirling. 2024. A Satellite View of Spatial Points in Conversation. In Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in Motion: Emerging Methods and Technologies, edited by Pentti Haddington, Tiina Eilittä, Antti Kamunen, Laura Kohonen-Aho, Tuire Oittinen, Iira Rautiainen, and Anna Vatanen, 171–98. Abingdon: Routledge. https://10.4324/9781003424888-12.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen, Eve Danziger, Jonathon Lum, Ali Alshehri, Elena Benedicto, Joe Blythe, Letizia Cerqueglini, Katharine T. Donelson, Alyson Eggleston, Alice Gaby, Yen-Ting Lin, Randi E. Moore, Tatiana Nikitina, Hywel Stoakes & Mayangna Yulbarangyang Balna. 2022. Reference frames in language and cognition: Cross-population mismatches. In Gaby et al (eds.) Linguistics Vanguard 8(S1). 175-189. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0091.
de Dear, Caroline, Joe Blythe, Francesco Possemato, Rod Gardner, Lesley Stirling, Ilana Mushin & Frances Kofod. 2021. Locational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija and English conversations. Gesture_ 20(3). 417–452. https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.20035.dea.
Gaby, Alice, Bill Palmer, Jonathon Lum & Jonathan Schlossberg (eds.) 2022. Sociotopography. Special collection in Linguistics Vanguard 8(S1). www.degruyter.com/journal/key/lingvan/8/s1/html.
Ennever, Tom. 2024. Topics in a Grammar of Space of Kukatja. PhD thesis, Monash University. https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/Topics_in_a_spatial_grammar_of_Kukatja/25777944
Hill, Clair. 2022. The irrelevance of scale and fixedness in landscape terms in two Australian Aboriginal languages. In Gaby et al (eds.) Linguistics Vanguard 8(S1): 91-100. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0107
Hoffmann, Dorothea. 2019. Restrictions on the usage of spatial frames of reference in location and orientation descriptions: Evidence from three Australian languages. Australian Journal of Linguistics 39(1):1-31.
Hoffmann, Dorothea, Bill Palmer & Alice Gaby. 2022. Geocentric directional systems in Australia: a typology. In Gaby et al (eds.) Linguistics Vanguard 8(S1):67-89. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0063 (Supplemental materials.)
Kemp, Charles, Alice Gaby & Terry Regier. 2019. Season naming and the local environment. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 539-545. http://lclab.berkeley.edu/papers/seasons-cogsci-2019.pdf
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput. 2025. Language, landscape, cognition and culture in Wik-Mungkan: A sociotopographic study of spatial grammar. PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput, & Bill Palmer. 2025. Contextualizing "cardinals": The semantics of geocentric terms in Wik-Mungkan. Australian Journal of Linguistics 45(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2024.2423090
Lum, Jonathon, Bill Palmer, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2022. Diversity in representing space within and between language communities. In Gaby et al (eds.) Linguistics Vanguard 8(S1):1-10. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0105
Palmer, Bill. 2022. Terrain, topography, landscape, and place: The interplay of environment, culture, and conceptualization. In Franz-Benjamin Mocnik & René Westerholt (eds.) Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL’21). ). Enschede, the Netherlands: Zotero. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6390896.
Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Alice Gaby, Dorothea Hoffmann & Maïa Ponsonnet. 2019. Geospatial natural language in Indigenous Australia: Research priorities. In Kristin Stock, Christopher B. Jones & Thora Tenbrink (eds.) Proceedings of speaking of location 2019: Communicating about space. vol. 2455:17–27. Regensburg, Germany: CEUR-WS.org. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2455/paper3.pdf.
Palmer, Bill, Dorothea Hoffmann, Joe Blythe, Alice Gaby, Bill Pascoe & Maïa Ponsonnet. 2021. Frames of spatial reference in five Australian languages. Spatial Cognition & Computation (Special issue: Speaking of location: Understanding, interpreting and generating natural language descriptions of space.) https://doi.org/10.1080/13875868.2021.1929239
Palmer, Bill, Alice Gaby & Jonathon Lum. 2025. Spatial frames, variation, and sociotopography. In Eric Pederson & Juergen Bohnemeyer (eds.) The expression of space. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. https://www.academia.edu/123349501/Spatial_frames_variation_and_sociotopography
Ponsonnet, Maïa, Dorothea Hoffmann and Isabel O’Keeffe (eds.) 2020. Emotion, body and mind across a continent: Figurative representations of emotions in Australian Aboriginal languages. Special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition 27(1).
Ponsonnet, Maïa & Kitty-Jean Laginha. 2020 The role of the body in descriptions of emotions. A typology of the Australian continent. Pragmatics & Cognition 27(1):20-82.
Possemato, Francesco, Joe Blythe, Caroline De Dear, Josua Dahmen, Rod Gardner & Lesley Stirling. 2021. Using a geospatial approach to document and analyse locational points in face-to-face conversation. Language Documentation and Description 20. 313–351. http://www.elpublishing.org/PID/239.
Symposium at the 9th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, September 2024
Convenors: Bill Palmer, Alice Gaby, Joe Blythe, Tom Ennever, Clair Hill, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Eleanor Yacopetti
Symposium papers (abstracts):Bohnemeyer, Juergen, Katharine T. Donelson, Elena Benedicto, Alyson Eggleston, Alejandra Capistrán Garza, María de Jesús Selene Hernández Gómez, Néstor Hernández Green, Samuel Herrera Castro, Randi E. Moore, Carolyn K. O’Meara, Enrique Palancar, Gabriela Pérez Báez, Gilles Polian & Rodrigo Romero Méndez. Reference frames in Mesoamerica: Evidence of cultural evolution.
Cerqueglini, Letizia. Spatial language, cognition, and environment across Negev Arabic Tribal varieties.
Ennever, Tom. Pointing practices amongst Kukatja speakers and what they reveal about underlying preferences in spatial cognition.
Fernandez Velasco, Pablo. Mental maps and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters.
Hansen, Magnus Pharao. Semantic content and informational values of Nahuatl toponyms: A possible role in cultural adaptation to landscape?
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput, Tom Ennever, Jonathon Lum & Eleanor Yacopetti. Re-framing Frames of Reference: 30 years of Man and Tree.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Bill Palmer. Environmental sensitivity and conceptual representations of geocentric spatial terms in Wik-Mungkan (Australia).
Meakins, Felicity, Joseph Kirschvink, Shinsuke Shimojo, Daw-An Wu, Lara Krisst & Isaac Hilburn. Geocentric languages and the perception of the earth’s magnetic field.
Obert, Karolin & Niclas Burenhult. Between brain and terrain: Investigating linguistic representation of environments during motion.
O’Meara, Carolyn & Oscar Castillo Tapia. Generic landscape terms in Seri placenames and how well they correspond with the places being named.
Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Tom Ennever, Alice Gaby, Clair Hill, Laurits Stapput Knudsen & Eleanor Yacopetti.New findings on the interaction of environment and spatial cognition.
Shapero, Joshua. When up is down and down is up: Local topography, landmarks and absolute Frames of Reference in Ancash Quechua spatial language.
Presentations
Blythe, Joe. 2023. Pointing (It Out). Invited plenary presented at the ICCA2023 (International Conference on Conversation Analysis), University of Queensland, July 2.
Blythe, Joe. 2024. The Primordial Centre of Everything. Invited seminar presented at the ANU, May 17.
Blythe, Joe, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Eleanor Yacopetti & Tom Ennever. 2022. The Rotating Scene Machine – a topographical testbench for semantic typology. Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, University of Melbourne. 30 November - 2 December.
Blythe, Joe, Jeremiah Ngubidirr Tunmuck, Rapahel Wurdanmanthupirr Tunmuck, and Jake Miller. 2024. Etic and Emic Approaches to Research on Murrinhpatha Spatial Language. ALW2024. Canberra, ACT.
Gaby, Alice, Louise Ashmore, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Bill Palmer, Jean-Christophe Verstraete & Oscar Whitehead. 2024. Rotating the Paman compass: tracing pathways of semantic change in directional adverbs. Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, Australian National University, 29 November.
Gaby, Alice, Thomas Poulton, Thomas Ennever & Bill Palmer. 2023. Using Optimality Theory to explain the right interpretation of left. Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, University of Sydney, 30 November.
Ito, Kiwako, Bill Palmer, Alexander Thorpe & Elizabeth Walker. 2023. Eye-movement demonstrates undifferentiated transverse-axis interpretations of English spatial expressions. Conference of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Wollongong University, 20 November.
Ito, Kiwako, Bill Palmer, Alexander Thorpe & Elizabeth Walker. 2023. Transverse-axis interpretation for undifferentiated expressions in English: Does it come in degrees? Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, University of Sydney, November 30.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput. 2022. Periphrasis, grammar, and lexicon: a usage-based approach to determine the structural status of spatial expressions. Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, University of Melbourne. 30 November - 2 December.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput &; Bill Palmer. 2022. The structural status of expressions of spatial frames of reference. Presented at the 14th conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology, University of Texas Austin. 14-17 December.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Bill Palmer. 2023. Contextualising cardinals: The semantics of geocentric terms in Wik-Mungkan. Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, 30 November.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput, Thomas Ennever, Eleanor Yacopetti, Joe Blythe, Maïa Ponsonnet, Alice Gaby, and Bill Palmer. 2023. A Cognitive Discourse Analysis of task participant behaviour in elicitation situations. International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, 10 August.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Magnus Pharao Hansen. 2021. Patterns of Variation in the use of spatial frames of reference in four Nahuatl varieties. Presented at the National Science Foundation workshop Environmental Adaptations of Spatial Grammar in Dialects of Nahuatl. Santa Fe, New Mexico, December.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Magnus Pharao Hansen. 2021. The coding of motion events in ten versions of the “Frog Story” from Hueyapan, Morelos. Presented at the National Science Foundation workshop Environmental Adaptations of Spatial Grammar in Dialects of Nahuatl. Santa Fe, New Mexico, December.
Knudsen, Laurits Stapput, Klara Båstadt, & Gabriela Citlahua Zapahua. 2021. Patterns of variation in frames of reference in Nahuatl of Tequila and Cuaquila. Presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Online. 10 January.
Lum, Jonathon, Bill Palmer, Alice Gaby & Jonathan Schlossberg. 2021. Shifting sands: variation and change in spatial reference on atolls. Presented at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation - Asia Pacific 6 (NWAV-AP6). National University of Singapore (online). 17-20 February.
Lum, Jonathon, Bill Palmer, Alice Gaby & Jonathan Schlossberg. 2021. Sociolinguistic and typological variation in frames of spatial reference. Presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. (online). 30 August - 3 September.
Palmer, Bill. 2021. A few thoughts on frame of reference and sociotopography. (invited) Presented at the National Science Foundation workshop Environmental Adaptations of Spatial Grammar in Dialects of Nahuatl. Santa Fe, New Mexico, December.
Palmer, Bill. 2021. Separating sagittal and transverse in egocentric (“relative”) frame of reference. Presented at the 8th International Conference on Spatial Cognition. Sapienza University of Rome (online). 13-17 September.
Palmer, Bill. 2021. Terrain, topography, landscape and place: the interplay of language, culture and environment. (keynote) Presented at PLATIAL’21: International Symposium on Platial Information Science. University of Twente, the Netherlands (online). 15-17 December.
Palmer, Bill. 2022. Sociotopography: Language, culture, environment and the representation of space. Invited colloquium, Centre for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo. 7 December.
Palmer, Bill. 2022. Spatial frames of reference in Australian languages. Invited presentation, Australian National University. 7 September.
Palmer, Bill. 2022. Spatial language in Meryam Mir (Oriomo, eastern Torres Strait). Presented at the 14th Conference on Austronesian and Papuan Languages & Linguistics. Leibnitz Centre for General Linguistics and Humboldt University, Berlin, 9-11 June.
Palmer, Bill. 2022. Spatial language in Meryam Mir (Oriomo, eastern Torres Strait) and its neighbours. Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, University of Melbourne. 30 November - 2 December.
Palmer, Bill. 2022. Talking about directions in Indigenous Australian languages. Presented at the Endangered Language Alliance and City University of New York, New York. 9 December.
Palmer, Bill. 2023. Egocentric spatial encoding in languages with no left and right. Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, Sydney University, November 30.
Palmer, Bill. 2023. Spatial frames of reference in Papuan languages. Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, Sydney University, 30 November
Palmer, Bill. 2023. Spatial frames and Sociotopography. Invited lecture at University College London Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience, 24 November.
Palmer, Bill. 2023. On the (non)rareness of egocentric spatial encoding. 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, 10 August
Palmer, Bill. 2023. Spatial frames of reference in Papuan languages – a survey. Plenary at the Conference on Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics, 24 August.
Palmer, Bill. 2024. Directional terms in Tangkic languages. Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, Australian National University, 29 November.
Palmer, Bill. 2024. Egocentric spatial encoding in languages with no left and right. Cognitive Linguistics in the year 2024, University of Silesia in Katowice, 18 September.
Palmer, Bill. 2024. Sociotopography: The interaction of language, environment, culture and cognition. Invited talk at University of Western Australia seminar, 4 April
Palmer, Bill, Dorothea Hoffmann & Alice Gaby. 2022. Directional terms in Australian languages: A survey. Presented at the 14th conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology, University of Texas Austin. 14-17 December.
Palmer, Bill, Dorothea Hoffmann, Alice Gaby, Joe Blythe, Maïa Ponsonnet, Margaret Carew, Thomas Ennever, Laurits Stapput Knudsen & Eleanor Yacopetti. 2021. Geocentric spatial systems in Australian languages. Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. 6-9 December.
Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Margaret Carew, Thomas Ennever, Alice Gaby, Clair Hill, Dorothea Hoffmann, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Maïa Ponsonnet & Eleanor Yacopetti. 2021. OzSpace: The sociotopography of language, landscape and culture in Australia. Presented at the First Global Australian Languages Workshop (GALW1). Yale (online). 17-21 May.
Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Alice Gaby, Clair Hill, Dorothea Hoffmann & Maïa Ponsonnet. 2021. Talking about directions in Australian languages. Presented at the First Global Australian Languages Workshop (GALW1). Yale (online). 17-21 May.
Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Alice Gaby, Dorothea Hoffmann & Maïa Ponsonnet. 2019. Geospatial natural language in Indigenous Australia: Research priorities. Presented at Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2019). University of Regensburg. 9-13 September.
Smith, Alex, Kiwako Ito & Bill Palmer. 2022. Gamifying the acquisition of novel spatial terms: A pilot eye-tracking study. Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, University of Melbourne. 30 November - 2 December.
Yacopetti, Eleanor. 2022. Language contact in Kune topological relations (Bininj Kunwok). Presented at the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, University of Melbourne. 30 November - 2 December.