@inproceedings{34db6d4f880c4d52967ff6fcc127e2b7,
title = "Angry Thunder and Vicious Frost: Remarks on the Unaccusativity of Chinese Weather Verbs",
abstract = "Thunder and frost are said in Sinitic languages to be controlled by higher powers, or to simply occur by themselves, or even to cast severe damage on human society as agents. Such diverse linguistic behaviours and meanings pose challenges and add complexity to the ongoing debate on the unaccusativity of weather verbs. We present in this paper an investigation into various weather verbs in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages based on dictionaries of different languages and corpus data. By a set of diagnostics, cases of unaccusative, unergative and transitive weather verbs have been attested in Sinitic languages. The majority of weather verbs are alternatively unaccusative or unergative, depending on which event structures they are associated with. Specifically, the unaccusative behaviour is linked to the view of weather events as happenstances, in the cognitive processing mode of sequential scanning; the unergative behaviour is linked to the view of weather events as activities, in the cognitive processing mode of summary scanning.",
keywords = "Event structure, Frost, Sinitic languages, Thunder, Unaccusativity, Weather verb",
author = "Sicong Dong and Jie Xu and Huang, {Chu Ren}",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.; 21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2020 ; Conference date: 28-05-2020 Through 30-05-2020",
year = "2021",
month = jul,
day = "26",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_6",
language = "English",
isbn = "9783030811969",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)",
publisher = "Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH",
pages = "64--73",
editor = "Meichun Liu and Chunyu Kit and Qi Su",
booktitle = "Chinese Lexical Semantics",
address = "Germany",
}