Magnus Pharao Hansen

The Nahuatl Space Project

Magnus Pharao Hansen (University of Copenhagen)

The Nahuatl Space project began in 2019, seeking to investigate whether local regional differences in how Nahuatl varieties encode spatial relations and how speakers orient spatially may correlate with differences between the landscapes where the varieties are spoken. The project has been somewhat disrupted by the Covid19 pandemic which interrupted fieldwork in 2020. Nevertheless, the project has by now been able to collect data on different elements of Spatial grammar in a handful of different Nahuatl speaking communities, located in diverse landscapes. This talk presents preliminary data on some differences that we have found among the studied varieties, both in locative constructions, the encoding of motion events and associated motion, and in the use of Frames of Reference in the communication of spatial relations.