Mr Laurits Knudsen

Laurits Stapput Knudsen is a linguist from Denmark and a PhD Candidate at the University of Newcastle. I currently research the interaction between landscape, culture, spatial language, and cognition in Indigenous Australia as part of the OzSpace project. I completed my master’s degree at the University of Copenhagen in Functional and Cognitive Linguistics.

My primary research interests are within the fields of:

-    Anthropological linguistics
-    Cognitive science
-    Semantic typology  

PhD project

My PhD project is a field-based investigation of spatial language in an Indigenous Community in Far North Queensland. I combine ethnographic methods, language description, and psycholinguistic methods to document and investigate how members of the community

-    talk about the space in their language
-    think about space
-    and how they interact with their physical environment on a day-to-day basis.

The goal is to build a better understanding of how the physical landscape interacts with social and cultural factors to shape spatial language and cognition in Indigenous Australia and in general.