Spatial frames of reference in Dholuo

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to investigate spatial frames of reference in Dholuo, a language from the Nilotic family. Spatial descriptions were elicited by implementing a novel task, the New Man and Tree Task, which is a photo-object referential task (as opposed to the more traditional photo–photo referential tasks). The New Man and Tree Task fully crosses the categories of featured vs. unfeatured, thus addressing potential shortcomings of various previous referential tasks. Testing a total of 40 native speakers of Dholuo, it was found that the decision of a participant to use a spatial frame of reference largely depended on the complex nature of the spatial scene, while the type of spatial frame of reference chosen partly depended on whether the stimuli was featured or unfeatured, and potentially how salient that specific frame of reference was in the mind of the speaker. Overall, both the relative and the object-centred spatial frames were the most preferred across all three feature categories which correspond to findings from an earlier study showing both as used in solving everyday tasks in Dholuo.