Ethnophysiographic Understanding of Landscape: A Comparative Study of a Mountain and a Plain Areas
Kim Joo-kwan. 2015. “Ethnophysiographic Understanding of Landscape: A Comparative Study of a Mountain and a Plain Areas”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 23(3). 77~89. The purpose of this paper is to describe how people perceive their surrounding landscape in terms of ethnosemantic perspective. The research area is named as ethnophysiography, which is coined recently. The paper is based on the ethnographic data collected in two different areas: mountain and plain area. Speakers in two areas perceive and categorize their landscape very similarly. The similarity can be explained by the concept ‘cognitive saliency.’ which means that people perceive their environments with respect to the cognitively and perceptually salient features. However, this study is a pilot one, which should be refined with more empirical data collected with the ethnographic method in various areas.