From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages

Abstract

Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today. This study investigates the use of different verbs to encode various weather events in Sinitic languages, a language family spoken over a wide range of climates and with 3000 years of continuous textual documentation. We propose to synergise the many concepts of kinesis that grew from Aristotle’s original ideas to account for the correlation between meteorological events and their linguistic encoding. It is observed that the two most salient key factors of weather events, i.e., mass of weather substances and speed of weather processes, are the two contributing components of kinetic energy. Leveraging the linguistic theory that kinesis underpins conceptualisation of verb classes, this paper successfully accounts for the selection of verbs for different meteorological events in all Sinitic languages in terms of both language variations and changes. Specifically, weather events with bigger weather substances and faster weather processes tend to select action verbs with high transitivity. The kinesis driven accounts also predict the typological variations between verbal and nominal constructions for weather expressions. The correlation between kinesis and the selection of verbs is further corroborated by an experiment on the perception of native Sinitic language speakers, as well as analyses of regional variations of verb selections that do not follow general typological patterns. It is found that such typological exceptions generally correspond to variations in meteorological patterns. By explicating the pivotal role of kinesis in bridging weather events and the linguistic encoding of weather, this study underlines the role of cognition as the conceptualisation of physical and sensory inputs to sharable knowledge encoded by language.

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

“…While the preference for non-directional expressions reverses the order. This contrast is likely related to the mass and state of the weather products: Suspended fog is light and more gas-like, dew is visibly liquid, and frost is solid and relatively heavy (see Huang et al, 2021, for more discussion). The results show that not only can fog, dew, and frost "fall" in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages, they even "fall" more than they "rise."…”

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

“…Following Labov [ 20 ], Leech [ 1 ] initiated the data driven approach to investigate the effect of social changes on language uses, focusing on the attitudinal expression of modal verbs. Taking advantage of the availability of a larger corpus, as well as the ubiquity of language big data, this paper joins the emergent trend of using linguistic evidence to identify environmental and societal changes [ 8 , 19 , 41 , 47 ]. In particular, this study leverages Halliday and Hasan’s theory [ 31 ] of putting language uses in the social context, and thus we can clearly identify the different behaviors of high and low value modal verbs to societal changes and we were able to produce a theoretically felicitous account that reconciles the discrepancies of the two previous studies by a careful experimental design.…”

“…This way we can ensure that the generalizations reported earlier can be subsumed by our more comprehensive study with year-to-year change patterns. In terms of solving Galton’s problem, we echo the approach proposed [ 19 ] for complex interactive systems. That is, we try to provide all corroborating evidence for the proposed account without attempting to establish a single logical causal relation.…”

Occupational gender segregation and gendered language in a language without gender: trends, variations, implications for social development in China

“…Second, it is not clear what linguistic features are effective cues for a language, such as Chinese, without grammatical genders. To solve Galton's problem, we follow the approach of (Huang et al, 2021). That is, we recognise that each important issue in the humanities and social sciences must be viewed in, and cannot be disassociated from, its sociocultural context.…”