Towards a new typology of meteorological events: A study based on synchronic and diachronic data

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

“…As also shown in Ren (2018), 雷 léi 'to thunder' and 电 diàn 'lightning flashes' were encoded as verbs in Archaic Chinese. The cross-linguistic investigation conducted in Dong et al (2020a) can lend support to this hypothesis: fog, dew and frost tend to be encoded as nouns across languages, and precipitation events can function as verbs in more languages than fog, dew and frost. Hence, the kinetic energy model can account for how meteorological events shape languages; this can be seen in the selection of verbs and the corresponding grammatical categories to represent such events.…”

“…This is a crucial research design that lays the foundation for the robust results that will be elaborated on further in the methodology section. Second, the language family exhibits the same degree of diversity as the Romance languages (Norman, 1988, p. 213) and has more than 1000 well-documented languages and dialects; it also has unbroken, written documentation containing meteorological data for over 3000 years (Dong et al, 2020a), therefore we can compare weather expressions with attested morphosyntactic differences across languages and verify the validity of our hypothesis with diachronic data. Third, Sinitic languages spread over a wide range of climates consisting of 12 temperature zones, 24 moisture regions and 56 climatic subregions (Zheng et al, 2010), which renders more linguistic data on meteorological diversity.…”

“…These recent studies took a closer look at how meteorological events are conceptualised and classified as the basis for the prediction of types of linguistic expressions. This approach is summarised as a new typology, Typology of Meteorological Events (TyME, Dong et al, 2020a). TyME relies on two features, [±Process] and [±Material], to classify meteorological events and map the classification to linguistic expressions.…”

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

“…The current study further investigates the ontological basis of directionality of weather expressions in various Sinitic languages based on Hantology. It should be noted that fog, dew, and frost also co-occur with "fall" in other language families in addition to Sinitic languages (Dong, 2019;Dong et al, 2020a). An important reason for focusing on Sinitic languages is their shared orthography, which has been conventionalized and has largely maintained its homomorphism for more than 3,000 years (Chou & Huang, 2010).…”