Documenting Language, Culture, and Cognition: Language and Space among the Waorani
This paper looks to investigate the intersection between the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science through the discussion of documentation projects and documenting spatial language. In focusing on the language and culture of the Waorani, an indigenous group of the Amazonian region of Ecuador, this paper examines the properties of the language's static locative constructions, the language's status as an isolate, and the challenges and successes in the documentation process at present. This study also addresses these topics' relation with the study of the intersection of space, language, and cognition by looking at some of the responses given by native speakers to the prompts in Bowerman and Pederson's (1992) "Topological Relations Picture Series," a set of line drawings that depict simple scenes such as an apple in a bowl. These speakers' responses, as examples of spatial language use, offer what Stephen Levinson (1996:356) calls "more than just a privileged access to [cognition]" which is "the intermediate variable that promises to explain cultural propensities in spatial behavior." This paper supports Levinson's claim that language, culture, and cognition are intimately linked and can be studied through spatial language expressions across cultures. Therefore, any conclusions drawn in this paper may bring the studies of anthropology, linguistics, and cognition closer to finding common ground and possibly contribute to the understanding of human behavior. Because of this, I argue that spatial language expressions are amongst the most important to elicit when doing documentation projects.