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.
Highlights
The “Falling” Fog and Other Scientifically Infelicitous Weather ExpressionsWeather verbs often represent the actual or perceived movement of weather phenomena
Multiple methods have been adopted in this study: analysis of Mandarin varieties based on corpus data, analysis of Sinitic languages based on dictionary data, analysis of classical text, and lexical semantic analysis based on Hantology
By examining the possible correlation between weather expressions and the observable effects of these weather events, we explore how perception of weather effects influences the morphosemantic behaviors of different weather expressions
Summary
The “Falling” Fog and Other Scientifically Infelicitous Weather ExpressionsWeather verbs often represent the actual or perceived movement of weather phenomena. Languages form several typological conventions for weather expressions (Eriksen et al, 2012; Ren & Dong, forthcoming) It is debatable whether these weather verbs inherently embody the actual weather events or just metaphorically represent them. A common expression that describes fog in Chinese weather forecasting is 普降大 霧 pǔ jiàng dà wù widely-fall-big-fog. This expression adopts the verb 降 jiàng “to fall” to encode a situation where certain areas are enveloped in dense fog. In this particular case, the Chinese weather verb does not seem to reflect the actual movement of the fog
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
