Linguistic expression of place appreciation in English and Welsh

Abstract

Despite the prominence of 'place' notions in human geography and beyond, the language 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.

Place attachment and perception of climate change as a threat in rural and urban areas

“…The listed search terms were identified post-hoc on the basis of the collected data, following methodological considerations motivated and detailed in [ 43 ] and related work reported in [ 47 , 49 , 50 ]; see also [ 51 , 52 ] for a similar approach in different fields. In this instance, a post-hoc approach was necessary because of the absence of a clearly established catalogue of linguistic indicators of place attachment, along with the flexibility and scenario dependency of each linguistic data set.…”

“…For current purposes these were identified as search terms to allow for a semi-automatic approach to coding, and then categorised into a gradual scale ranging from weak to strong indicators of place attachment. Categorisation was based on examination of the data, inspired by the literature on place facets as reported above [24], and captured by an overarching definition as follows ( The listed search terms were identified post-hoc on the basis of the collected data, following methodological considerations motivated and detailed in [43] and related work reported in [47,49,50]; see also [51,52] for a similar approach in different fields. In this instance, a posthoc approach was necessary because of the absence of a clearly established catalogue of linguistic indicators of place attachment, along with the flexibility and scenario dependency of each linguistic data set.…”

Spatial Information Science in 2023

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Since our 10th anniversary issues published in 2020 [1,2], JOSIS has continued to publish a number of excellent research articles on many of the topics highlighted by our editorial board in their invited papers. These include articles on crowdsourcing [10], place [18,17,23,13,3], spatial language [5,15,24,19], GeoAI [14], movement analysis [26,11], urban analysis and wayfinding [16,21,7], methods for spatial analysis and uncertainty [22,25,6,20], environmental data and modeling [8,12,9], and qualitative spatial reasoning [4]. We are happy to also note that these articles represent research conducted around the world, with authors based in Australia,

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