Directionality and Momentum of Water in Weather: A Morphosemantic Study of Conceptualisation Based on Hantology

Abstract

We present in this paper a study of the conceptualisation of meteorological events involving water in Chinese based on Hantology, a SUMO-based ontology of Chinese orthography. Our comprehensive investigation of the morphosemantic behaviours of these weather words in both Mandarin and Sinitic languages reveals that they are predicted by the directionality and momentum of their formation and movement. We studied events involving water in both liquid and solid forms: such as rain, snow, hail, fog, dew and frost. They share the radical 雨, which can be linked to two SUMO nodes according to Hantology. This ontological bifurcation can be shown to bring about not only the diversity of direction expressions referring to these words for water, but also the differences of semantic features and PoS between them in Archaic Chinese. Moreover, the momentum of different water forms is proposed to be the physical basis for the differences of PoS, semantic features and node linking.

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

“…Such phenomena are common to most societies, and may play a considerable part in agriculture and transportation, thus certainly deserve careful consideration. Besides, several of the latest studies have shown that the weather words for these phenomena in Sinitic languages have quite intriguing grammatical and semantic behaviours (e.g., Dong, 2018Dong, , 2019Dong et al, 2020). More importantly, as we will see later in this article, a closer cross-linguistic investigation on fog, dew and frost may have significant implications for the typology of meteorological events at issue.…”

“…We have mentioned above that 雨 yǔ 'rain/to rain', 雪 xuě 'snow/to snow' and 雹 báo 'hail/to hail' have verbal usage in Old Chinese, as illustrated in (4)-( 6) below, quoted from Ren (2018). This means that Old Chinese has the predicate encoding type for precipitation, as noted by Van Hoey (2018) and Dong et al (2020). Furthermore, Ren & Dong (forthcoming) stated that predicate type was the predominant encoding type for precipitation among all the available methods in Old Chinese.…”

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

“…Based on the morphosemantic and grammatical behaviours of weather words, chiefly for different forms of precipitation and other weather events involving water (e.g., rain, snow, fog, frost), these studies demonstrated the diversity of verbs in weather expressions, especially those encoded with the argument type. For example, in terms of directionality, weather events such as fog and dew could select verbs of falling, while they do not move downwards in reality (Dong et al, 2020c). In addition, contrary to the predictions of previous studies, unaccusative, unergative and transitive verbs can all be attested in weather expressions in Sinitic languages (Dong et al, 2020b).…”

“…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.…”

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

“…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 (CLSW2019).…”