Acknowledgements
This study is the product of intensive fieldwork carried out in the Negev (in southern Israel) from 2011 to 2019. The early phase of data collection, which took place from 2011 and 2013, centered on the selection of spatial frames of reference used in language by the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ elders and became the topic of my doctoral thesis, defended in 2014 at the University of Pisa and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. My interest in universalism vs. linguistic determinism and cross-cultural relativism arose in 2010 during a course on linguistic anthropology taught by Professor Roberto Ajello at the University of Pisa. He also transmitted to me a passion for spoken languages and linguistic fieldwork. Having obtained a doctoral position at the Department of Linguistics of the same university, I enjoyed the extraordinary opportunity to participate in a seminar on spatial representations led by Professor Giovanna Marotta, whose methodological insights were decisive in the discovery of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ eldersâ referential system. At the time, Professor Marotta was heading a project on spatial representations in Italian in which many young scholars were taking part. The themes discussed during the seminar were manifold, and included semantic corpora annotation, motion events, frames of reference, spatial representations among the blind, and diachronic and synchronic analysis of prepositions in Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages. During the seminar and the conferences and workshops that followed, I built most of my theoretical background, while I acquired my methodological training during a year-long stay in Indonesia in the framework of an Erasmus Mundus program between the University of Pisa and the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Very soon I was afforded the opportunity to combine this toolbox with my previous knowledge of Semitic languages when, during a conference at the Sde Boqer campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, professors Alexander Borg and Gideon Kressel invited me to conduct studies on linguistic anthropology among the local Bedouin tribes. After a brief preliminary survey among the major Negev Bedouin groups, I decided to focus my attention on the spatial language of the elders of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ tribe, which dwells in the village of (al-)LigÄ«yih, on the northern fringes of the Negev. In the following months, thanks to professors Roni Henkin, Giovanna Marotta, Pier Giorgio Borbone, and Alessandro Lenci, a co-tutorship between the University of Pisa and Ben-Gurion University was arranged and I was able to conduct my research in the Negev, enjoying the same status and facilities as local students.
The choice of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ tribe was dictated not only by the particular features of their spatial language, but also by their generous and warm hospitality. Living in an official, recognized village provided with state infrastructure and acquainted with the presence of some Western scholars who had visited the tribe in the past, the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ had no objection to hosting me and cooperating with me. A crucial role in this endeavor was played by Valeria, a highly respected Italian woman who had married a member of the tribe in the nineteen seventies and completely assimilated into Bedouin culture and language. Valeria and her husband, Dr. Ê¿AbdelraḥmÄn, became my family over the years of the project and introduced me to tribal elders from the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ and the neighboring tribes. The entire aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ family, especially the Ê¿Älit ḥÄÄÄ SalmÄn, helped me enormously: Ê¿AbdelkarÄ«m, HÄÄir, Sarah, MilÄd, IbrÄhÄ«m, Amal, FÄá¹mih, ZyÄd, the matriarch NiÊ¿mih, Maryam, Ê¿EmÄd, Layla, and SamÄ«r. I will be always extremely grateful to all of them and many others, not only for their cooperation, but also for their friendship, their company, and their warmth. They made me appreciate the beauty of an ancient, rich language, and the quintessential values of a traditional Bedouin culture that is proudly surviving in the present. I will never forget the almost one-hundred-year-old NiÊ¿mih, still proud of her beauty, putting kuḥl on her eyes, wearing bracelets, and donning embroidered white veils. During our meetings, she showed me pictures of the family horses, hanging on the wall over her bed, like memories of the past. I will never forget Adam and his passion for his grandfatherâs stories before bedtime. I will not forget our visits to Ê¿AbdelkarÄ«m, the eldest brother of Dr. Ê¿AbdelraḥmÄn, at the beginning of spring, when he took his flock to graze on the first fresh grass on the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ lands outside of LigÄ«yih. There he built his seasonal tent and lived âthe life of beforeâ again. On summer nights, small wolves came close to our camp when the fire faded, attracted by the smell of the meat, and the children were frightened and amused at the same time. Finally, as a sign of my integration in the family, when Ê¿AbdelkarÄ«m hosted the marriage celebration for the youngest of his sons, I was invited to take part in the last dance of the evening, the one in which the intimate relatives gather to dance in a circle, sharing joy and support with the new couple. That evening, I certainly had a great deal of fun, but most of all I felt that I had been given a great honor and was immensely fortunate to have a family in the Negev.
My frequent presence at family meetings and daily interactions enabled me to observe many aspects of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ spatial language. I could even appreciate how spatial representations changed between experimental settings and spontaneous speech. Within spontaneous speech practices, spatial representations were constantly adapted to different styles, audiences, occasions, communicative scopes, and contexts. So, for example, describing the same spatial scene to a nearby listener, a listener on the telephone, or a nearby listener viewing the same scene constrains the quantity and the quality of the spatial information encoded in the message and its distribution over different communicative modalities (speech, gaze direction, head, chin, and body signals, hand pointing) in different ways. I could intuit the importance of the audience in the construction of a spatial message; communicating with younger people, elderly aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ speakers have to adapt their referential practices and shift to other systems, renouncing, for example, the use of cardinal directions. Indeed, middle-aged and young speakers are progressively losing competence in cardinal orientation, with some individual exceptions. For all these observations and insights, I am deeply indebted to the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿âor the aá¹£-á¹¢unnÄÊ¿, as they collectively call themselves, for allowing me to interact with them in private, familiar, public, and experimental contexts. Valeria and Ê¿AbdelraḥmÄn also introduced me to other Bedouin lineages, geographically, genetically, or socially close to the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿, mainly belonging to the GdÄrÄt and the TiyÄha groups. Thus, through their mediation, I was able to contact and work with the al-Ê¿UgbÄ«, the AbÅ«-GrÄnÄ«, the aá¹-ṬalÄlgih, the al-Asad, the al-ḤÄÅ«Ä, the AbÅ«-Kaff, the al-HawÄÅ¡lih, the al-Aá¹raÅ¡, and the AbÅ«-Ê¿Aá¹£Ä clans. I was also able to contact the AbÅ«-Ê¿Äbid, originally slaves, integrated over many centuries into the cliental system of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿. More recently, the AbÅ«-Ä ÅrÄ« clan became a client of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ and requested permission to dwell in a northwestern portion of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ land, probably to find refuge from an internal tribal feud in their original homeland. Within LigÄ«yih, I was also introduced to some friends from the MaÊ¿ÄnÄ«yih tribe, a group scattered across the Negev and Jordan and mainly dwelling in the cities of Rahaá¹, KsÄfe, and LigÄ«yih. Interestingly, I was not directly introduced by aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ members to different Negev confederations (á¸Ì£ullÄm, Ê¿AzÄzmih, and TarÄbÄ«n), which are geographically âremote,â alien, or rather indifferent to my hosts. Nonetheless, as I was also in contact with them, I had to inform my hosts about my relations with the other tribes, in particular my visits to other tribal territories. The comparisons among the different TiyÄha groups led me to formulate an internal classification of the tribes and lineages included in the TiyÄha confederation on the basis of their spatial language and referential practices. Interestingly, the referential style varies according to genetic affiliation, perfectly reflecting the marriage strategies that bind the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ lineage to some close relatives while excluding other TiyÄha groups. Furthermore, variation in spatial referential practices correlates with other phonological and morphological interdialectal differences, contributing to the reconstruction of the linguistic history of Negev Arabic, an enterprise that remains to be undertaken. For these discoveries, I am very grateful to all the TiyÄha speakers who kindly agreed to take part in my experiments and invite me to their homes.
The linguistic research described above was conducted over the course of about four years. Ultimately, my PhD dissertation turned out to be restricted to the complex analysis of a very special application of the relative frame of reference specific to the language of the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ elders. It was published in 2015 by the University of Pisa, edited by Marotta. My interest was increasingly piqued by the discovery of the existence of a very special linguistic referential system among the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ that uses the complete tripartite typology of frames of reference described in Levinson (2003) and is based on the ontological characteristics culturally attributed to spatial entities. Over the next two years, I refined my methodology and broadened my analysis, including the cross-generational exploration of the referential system in cognition. I was able to remain close to the tribe thanks to a post-doctoral position obtained at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, under the supervision of Prof. Roni Henkin, with whom I later coauthored two articles in which we explored in depth the topic of spatial linguistic representations in Negev Arabic. In the first (Cerqueglini and Henkin 2016), we analyzed the use of cardinal directions in traditional Bedouin narrative, poetry, and proverbs from the Arabian focal homeland through the subsequent historical migrations, proving that cardinal orientation was the original, primeval spatial system among all Arab nomads. In the second (Cerqueglini and Henkin 2018), we established the semantic criteria according to which elderly Negev Arabic speakers classify spatial entities and select different referential strategies in language. In line with the suggestion of Prof. Jürgen Bohnemeyer, we called the aá¹£-á¹¢ÄniÊ¿ semantic system âreferentially complementary,â as different frames of reference appear in contrastive or complementary distribution based on spatial entities involved in the description.
Finally, in the last two years, thanks to a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF 680/17, 2017â2021), I was able to examine the referential systems of the other Negev Bedouin confederations (á¸Ì£ullÄm, Ê¿AzÄzmih, TarÄbÄ«n, MaÊ¿ÄnÄ«yÄ«n) and sedentarized groups that orbit around the original Bedouin in the Negev (AbÅ«-Ê¿AÄÄÄ). My exploration of spatial representations extended over time and also covered Galilean Bedouin tribes (WÄdy SallÄmah, Jisr iz-ZÄrqa), mixed groups in Lod and Ramla (Central Israel), and sedentary peoples from the Galilee and the Muṯallaṯ. I tested them linguistically and cognitively. Some of these new data are reported in this book for purposes of comparison.
Having completed this book, I realize how many people I still have to thank for their support at every stage to its development: Mwaffaq AbÅ« RabÄ«Ê¿ih, Hiba Ê¿AmmÄÅ¡, Binas ṬÄhÄ, AmÄ«r Ê¿AÄmÄl, and SalÄm Ê¿Eydeh, crucial contact people who helped me to find my way to the âbestâ informants. I recall with special affection NiÊ¿mih and Ê¿AbdelraḥmÄn, who have since left this world. May their memories be forever blessed. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Edoardo Cavirani and to Prof. Anthony Jukes, Prof. Antonio Cavallaro, and Prof. FrantiÅ¡ek KratochvÃl, for their support in the doctoral years and the first fieldwork campaigns, and to Prof. Bill Palmer, Prof. Jürgen Bohnemeyer, and Prof. Alice Gaby for having supported the diffusion of my research. I want to mention my friends, Takashi, Gila, Raquel, Daniel, Gabriel, Etty, Reuma, Achinoam, Ishar, Ilan, Rossella, and Vera, who supported and encouraged me throughout these years of intense work, intellectual growth, and sociocultural adaptation. The friendship, understanding, and advice of Prof. Tamar Sovran has been one of my greatest fortunes. My deepest gratitude and acknowledgement go to Prof. Rachel Cinnamon Gali, dean of the Faculty of Humanities, for her understanding and support and to Prof. Matthew Morgenstern, Prof. Hezy Mutzafi, and Dr. Einat Gonen, former and current head of the Department of Hebrew Language and Semitic Linguistics at Tel-Aviv University, my guides and mentors, who have continually urged me to give written form to this research. For inclusion of this volume into the present Brill monograph series I am profoundly indepted to the editors, Prof. A.Y. Aikhenvald, Prof. R.M.W. Dixon, and Prof. N.J. Enfield. I also express my sincere gratitude to the anonymous readers of my manuscript for their constructive comments and to Brill experts Elisa Perotti and Madelon Janse, whose efficient handling of my monograph facilitated its preparation for publication. Finally, I thank my mother and father, for believing in me and supporting me patiently and lovingly. Even if we are far apart, we are always together.