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.
Highlights
Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today
For the variable Language, we roughly divided participants into two groups of northern and southern, according to their ‘dialectal’ linguistic background, i.e., the regional Sinitic languages they use. Since it has been well-documented in Chinese dialectology that many isoglosses roughly follow the north vs. south pattern along the line of Yangtze River (e.g., Cao, 2008), we examine in this experiment the potential differences in kinesis perception by the northern vs. southern Sinitic language speakers
We show again that when the same word refers to two different weather events in different historical periods, for selection of the grammatical categories and encoding verbs, kinesis makes the correct prediction over historical relationships
Summary
Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today. It is impractical to get the required time-span and geographical scale of data to scientifically establish eco-environmental changes and/or impact causality, given the time it takes for the impact on the environment or humans to be fully documented To tackle this shared challenge, the scientific community has proposed alternatives to purely quantitative-measurement studies. These debates focused on the relation between the number of categories a language can describe and their environment With rare exceptions, such as Cruikshank (2012), previous linguistic and linguistic anthropological studies on weather expressions did not link the linguistic system to meteorological knowledge of weather events. The data set we chose to work with is verbs in weather expressions in different Sinitic languages The choice of this language family is crucial in three ways and helps us to establish an environment as close to a controlled study as possible, given the scale and complexity of the issues involved
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