Open Linguistics 2017; 3: 554–581 Nicholas Williams* Place reference in Kula conversation https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2017-0028 Received March 9, 2017; accepted November 15, 2017 Abstract: Place reference is pervasive in talk-in-interaction but remains less well understood than reference to persons. This paper explores place reference in Kula, an endangered non-Austronesian language of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family in southeastern Indonesia. Using a Conversation Analytic approach, it provides a description of both verbal and nonverbal resources for achieving successful reference to place in Kula. The paper also contributes to the cross-linguistic study of reference in conversation. The organization of practices for place reference in interaction in Kula is suggested to conform to more generic organizational principles, e.g. preferences for minimization and recognition, and fitting the formulation to the task-at- hand, while also reflecting properties specific to Kula, e.g. the use of elevationals in formulations of place reference. Keywords: place reference, repair, elevationals, pointing, conversation analysis, Alor-Pantar languages 1 Introduction This paper describes practices for referring to place in everyday conversation in Kula, a non-Austronesian language of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family spoken in southeastern Indonesia. As such, it contributes both to the description of this lesser-known language family and to the cross-linguistic study of reference in conversation, which to date has focused primarily (albeit not exclusively) on English and on reference to persons (Sacks and Schegloff 1979, Schegloff 1996, 2007, Enfield & Stivers 2007, Blythe 2009). This study also demonstrates an interactional approach to basic grammatical description, taking a recurrent problem of everyday talk – how to formulate reference to place given the wide variety of options available to speakers of any language (see Enfield 2013 for a proposed list) – and identifying recurrent practices for resolving the problem (cf. Dingemanse & Floyd 2014). This approach facilitates an account of grammatical practice rooted in everyday interaction, arguably the most frequent and basic form of language use (see Gaudio 2003 for a dissenting view), and brings together both verbal and non-verbal practices under a single descriptive account. The language of space has been the object of numerous studies for decades. Influential work on spatial categories in language and cognition by Levinson (2003) and Levinson and Wilkins (2006) established a typology of spatial frames of reference and other resources for referring to space in a wide range of languages, while papers in Burenhult and Levinson (2008) examined landscape terminology and identified human affordance and cultural models as primary driving forces behind landscape categorization. Much of this work has established the striking diversity of linguistic categorization of space, despite humans’ shared organs of perception and cognition (Levinson 2008). A significant focus in other descriptive and typological work has been spatial deixis, especially demonstratives, from both typological (Anderson & Research Article Article note: Part of a special issue on place reference in conversation, edited by Lila San Roque and N.J. Enfield *Corresponding author: Nicholas Williams, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States, E-mail: n.jay.williams@gmail.com Open Access. © 2017 Nicholas Williams, published by De Gruyter Open. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/17 4:41 PM