Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 90

the airport” produces a group replacing intermediate decision points by a procedural
description (remember Clark's “know only as much as you need to know to get the
job done”?).
The effect is even more dominant in route descriptions for travels through partly
familiar environments or when using multiple modes of movement. An example
for the prior is the route description to a conference: “At Beijing Airport, take the
capital airport express train ...”, which is completely ignoring the traveller's route
to Beijing Airport. Adhering to above principles, the speaker is rightly assuming
that the experienced conference traveller will manage this part on his or her own.
Similarly, while transfers along multi-modal routes are relatively small scale in
space and time, they put more responsibility on the wayfinder than the longer legs
of the journey. Accordingly, descriptions of multi-modal routes adhering to above
principles will vary in spatial granularity, providing information of finer spatial
granularity for transfers [ 82 , 213 ] .

3.4.3.2 Place Descriptions

Place descriptions are so common that we do not think much about them. A person
tells her partner where the keys have been left, or where they should meet in the
evening. They call a local emergency number when they have witnessed an accident
and explain where this has happened. They write captions revealing locations when
uploading holiday pictures to a social networking site. Social conventions even
create new forms of place descriptions, such as checking in on one social networking
site, or hashtagging a location on another site. All these conversations are performed
with the intention to help the recipient identifying or finding these places. More
complex place descriptions can describe whole configurations of objects. These
descriptions are intending to help the recipient to form a mental image of an
environment. For example, a person moving into a new apartment may send a letter
to an old friend describing this apartment as a configuration of rooms. Or a second
year student may explain the configuration of buildings on campus to a fresh first
year student.
Both kinds of place descriptions are challenged by the linear structure of
language. A description of a location has to refer to objects in the environment
that are in some two-dimensional relationship with the location to be specified (“the
café in Richmond”), or a three-dimensional relationship (“the key is on the living
room table, below the newspaper”), or even a relationship that realizes a temporal
dimension (“in front of the place where the café has been”). Now we already
recognize that all references to relata are references to landmarks, and assumed to
be known or recognizable by the recipient.
We call the located object the locatum . This object is located in relationship to
one or several known objects, the relata . The relata form the frame of reference to
locate the locatum. The speaker must assume knowledge of the relata to be shared
by the recipient, such that the recipient can re-establish the frame of reference in
their mind.