Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions

Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (GY) make heavy use in discourse offour roots that mean north, south, east, and west. Describing location with cardinal directions involves principles strikingly different from systems based on the anatomies of ref- erence objects, including speakers and hearers themselves. Nonetheless, the relational and situated nature of cardinal term systems has been insufficiently appreciated. This article ex- plores the linguistic details of the GYcardinal term system, to ex- pose the internal logic of the elaborated set of directional terms, to analyze the conceptual and ethnographic underpinnings of their use, and to demonstrate the anchored and deictic nature of GY directional discourse generally. peakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr (hereafter GY) at the Hopevale community near Cooktown, in far North Queensland, make heavy use in discourse about position and motion of inflected forms of four cardinal direction roots-similar in meaning to north, south, east, and west.2 The system of cardinal directions appears to involve principles for calculat- ing horizontal position and motion strikingly different from familiar sys- tems based on the anatomies of reference objects, including speakers and hearers themselves. Rather than calculating location relative to inherent asymmetries in local reference objects, or from the viewpoint of observers themselves characterized by such asymmetries, the GY system apparently takes as its primitives global geocentric coordinates, seemingly inde- pendent of specific local terrain and based instead on horizontal angles that are fixed, as it were, by the earth (and perhaps the sun) and not subject to the rotation of observers or reference objects.