TY - JOUR
T1 - From language to meteorology
T2 - kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages
AU - Huang, Chu Ren
AU - Dong, Sicong
AU - Yang, Yike
AU - Ren, He
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was partly funded by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University–Peking University Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics (RP2U2), as well as the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Project #ZZJL ‘Transitivity in Light Verb Constructions: Studies in Mandarin Chinese and Beyond’. Earlier versions of parts of this paper were presented as Dong et al. (2020c) and Huang and Dong (2020) at the 20th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW). We would like to thank the reviewers and audience of CLSW 2019 for their helpful comments. We also wish to express our gratitude to Kathleen Ahrens for her helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/1/4
Y1 - 2021/1/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85098647274&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1057/s41599-020-00682-w
DO - 10.1057/s41599-020-00682-w
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85098647274
SN - 2662-9992
VL - 8
JO - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
JF - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 4
ER -