Directionality of Atmospheric Water in Chinese: A Lexical Semantic Study Based on Linguistic Ontology

Abstract

Why are fog, dew, and frost said to “fall” in some languages when they don’t in the physical world? We explore this seeming infelicity to study the nature of linguistic conceptualization. We focus on variations and changes of the morphosemantic behaviors of weather words in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages with an interdisciplinary approach to establish links between linguistic expressions and scientific facts. We propose that this use of directionality is the result of conventionalization of Chinese people’s inference from shared daily experience, and is well motivated in terms of a linguistic ontology that reflects a scientific account of natural phenomena. We further demonstrate that the semantically relevant orthography shared by Chinese speakers can be directly mapped to Hantology, a formal linguistic ontology based on Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). In this mapping, the radical 雨 yǔ “rain,” derived from the ideograph of “rain” to represent atmospheric water, provides crucial clues to the use of directional verbs and the parts of speech of weather words. Our findings also lend support to language-based reconstruction of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and lay foundation for TEK research in the Sinosphere.

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“…In the computer science field, ontologies are an explicit specification of a conceptualization [18]. Ontologies represent concepts and their relations in terms of generalization and specificity and can have different applications in fields such as artificial intelligence, web semantics, or linguistics [19,20].…”

“…The equilibrium point is located at the coordinates (6.38, 0.48), that is, in level 6, producing an AS score of 0.48, while the maximum score is achieved at level 2, with an AS score of 0.62. 17 14.8 0.882 18 3.0 0.544 19 16.5 1.044…”

A Tool for Recommending Keywords with More Live and More Attention

“…In the Computer Science field, ontologies are an explicit specification of a conceptualization (Gruber 1993). Ontologies represent concepts and their relations in terms of generalization and specificity and can have different applications in fields such as artificial intelligence, web semantics, or linguistics (Dong et al 2021;Guarino, Oberle, and Staab 2009).…”

Regional varieties and diachronic changes in Chinese political discourse

“…Linguistic encoding of weather, for example, has been shown to vary typologically. Huang et al (2021) and Dong et al (2021) showed that the variations in the use of different linguistic devices to encode kinesis in China correspond to the actual distribution of weather patterns in China based on the different kinetic energy of the weather events. Su et al (2021) showed that historical and geographic variations in professional gender segregation in China can be mapped to the use (or lack) of gender modification of professional terms.…”